The Onion Girl

by Charles de Lint

  I keep my eye on them shimmers. They’re in the parking lot. They’re by the side door we go in. There’s a couple in the hall we’re walking down and if there ain’t any in my sister’s room, at least there’s one right outside the door on the other side of the wall.

  “She’s still lookin’ kinda fucked up,” Pinky whispers.

  I nod. I’m waiting to see if the red rage is gonna come over me, like Pinky was worrying over in the parking lot, but I don’t feel much of nothing, looking down at her here on her bed. I’m not saying I suddenly come over all sappy-eyed and feeling sorry for her. I just don’t want to start punching in on her face the way it comes over me whenever I saw her picture afore this. But that don’t mean I’m gonna walk away neither.

  “I guess,” I say, finally replying to Pinky. “But she’s got to know herself some mental anguish if any of this is gonna mean anything.”

  “You figure we can touch her without her wakin’ up on us?”

  “I dunno. But it ain’t gonna make much difference, is it? She can wake up and scream, but by the time a nurse gets here, we’re gonna be through that shimmer and in someplace they can’t begin to follow.”

  “So we’re takin’ her?” Pinky asks.

  I been thinkin’ ’bout this ever since Pinky brought it up, and it looks better every time I let it take a run through my head.

  “Well, we ain’t here to give her no good sister award.”

  “She don’t look like much,” Pinky says. “I can pick her up on my own. You go do whatever it is you need to do to get that shimmer ready to take us away.”

  I take a last look at Jillian May, lying there so peaceful on her bed. She’s far gone—deep in the dreamlands, I reckon. I doubt she’ll even stir when Pinky lifts her from the bed.

  “Ray?”

  I nod and walk back into the hall, have me a look both ways. I don’t see nobody.

  “Okay,” I call softly back to Pinky.

  I’ll give her this. Right from when we was kids, Pinky mighta been built like some elegant showgirl, but she was always strong and she still is. She just picks that sister of mine up like she don’t weigh nothing and steps back from the bed. Jillian May’s head lolls on one side of Pinky, her feet on the other, the arms hanging like they don’t know where they’re supposed to go. And she don’t wake up. Hell, I don’t even hear her breathing change none.

  Pinky carries her to where I’m standing. I got me the duffel in one hand and put the other on Pinky’s shoulder, steering her into that shimmer she can’t see.

  “Hey!” I hear somebody yell from down the hall by the nurses’ station.

  I don’t even bother to take me a look. I just walk us into the shimmer and we’re gone.

  Jilly

  Once upon a time …

  Either my navigation skills have improved, or whatever fateful whimsy that sent me to the Inn of the Star-Crossed the last time I was here is looking the other way, because this time I arrive right where I want to be, high up on the many roads-wide convergence of branches of that tallest of the cathedral trees. Or maybe I had one of my blackouts while crossing over the last time. I think of that because when I do arrive at this place, I can’t remember why I’m here, what I came to do. But this time it comes back to me quickly enough.

  I look up and I can’t see the top. It’s going to be a long way up to those wizard branches of Toby’s.

  This juncture of branches still makes me feel like I’m on a raft, all these branches coming out of the trunk at this one point to form what feels like a large natural platform, the slight sway of the tree itself mimicking the slow rise and fall of a river’s current. I look away through the break in the branches, my gaze traveling over the tops of the other trees that make up the Greatwood, off to the west where foothills climb up to the distant mountains. I note the inn and marvel again at how clearly I can see it from here, because it’s not as big as you’d think it would have to be from this vantage. Finally, I turn back to the rat’s nest of branches and vines that cluster around the trunk.

  Time to start climbing, I think.

  I’m actually looking forward to the physical exertion. I think I’d actually enjoy digging ditches at this point in my life, since the Broken Girl I really am can’t do a damn thing. She still can’t even get up out of bed by herself. Or feed herself, for that matter. My brain coughs up a whole litany of the things that the Broken Girl can’t do anymore until I begin to feel depressed and completely overwhelmed.

  “Oh, just stop it,” I tell myself.

  “I can’t, I can’t,” someone replies in a broken voice.

  That’s when I realize it’s not just myself and the birds and little forest critters up here on this platform of branches.

  I recognize Toby’s voice, but it takes me a moment to find him where he’s huddled mournfully in a nest of intertwined branches and vines near the trunk of the tree. He lifts his face to me as I approach, tears streaking his cheeks, his eyes all red-rimmed and swollen.

  “I’m just so bad,” he says.

  I crouch down so that our faces are level, though I’m looking at him through a raggedy crisscross of twigs and strands of vine.

  “Why are you so bad?” I ask.

  “I … I’m everything you said I was. I was just your friend so you’d help me become more magic. So I wouldn’t fade away and die.”

  “Well, that’s understandable,” I tell him. “You were scared. I know all about being scared.”

  “No, I’m just bad and bad. You … you should find yourself a real friend.”

  I reach through the tangle of vegetation and put my hand on his knee.

  “Friends are supposed to be there for each other through thick and thin,” I tell him. “If I’d been a good friend, I would have just helped you get those magic twigs without making you go through twenty questions.”

  He sniffles. “You didn’t ask me that many.”

  “It’s just an expression.”

  He wipes his nose on his sleeve.

  “Come on,” I say. “Why don’t you get out of there?”

  “I suppose …”

  Even with my help, it takes him a moment or two to extricate himself from the thicket. When he’s finally standing beside me, he’s still acting all hangdog and sad, shoulders drooping, gaze on the ground, won’t look me in the eye. So I give him a hug, which is fine at first. I can tell it perks him right up. Unfortunately, it perks him up a little too much. I let him go and step away.

  “Whoops,” he says.

  He sticks his hands in his pockets and tents out his pants a little to hide his boner. But he’s grinning while he does it.

  “See, I told you I had a penis,” he says.

  I have to smile back. “I never doubted you for a moment.”

  “If you ever change your mind about wanting a boyfriend …”

  “You’ll be the first I tell,” I assure him.

  He’s still got that mercurial temperament, I see. Going from whimsical to serious—or in this case, sad to cheerful—in the blink of an eye. But I don’t mind. I hated seeing him so depressed.

  “How long were you hiding in there?” I ask him.

  He shrugs. “I don’t remember. Days. Weeks. How long were you gone?”

  “Hardly weeks.”

  “Did you miss me?”

  “Actually,” I say. “I did.”

  “Me, too. I promise to be a good friend from now on.”

  He takes his hands from his pocket and his pants fall back naturally, unimpeded by the evidence of his earlier excitement.

  “So what do you want to do now?” he asks.

  I point upward.

  “No, no,” he says. “We don’t have to do that anymore. I told you. I’m going to be a good friend. Not someone who just wants you to do things for him.”

  “But that’s what I want to do,” I tell him. “It’s why I’m here.”

  “You need magic now?”

  “Everybody needs magic,” I say.
<
br />   “Everything already is magic,” Toby says. “Just most people don’t see it. Maybe what we need is miracles.”

  I look at him, trying to remember if I ever told him about the Broken Girl I am when I’m not here in the cathedral world. But all I say is, “Miracles are good.”

  “And rare,” Toby agrees. “Can you earn them, do you think?”

  “You mean by climbing up to these wizard twigs of yours?”

  He nods.

  “I guess there’s only one way to find out.”

  So up we go again. It’s like climbing a net woven of vines and branches and I revel in the sheer physicality of it. I never get the feeling we’re in any real danger, but it seems whenever I start to feel too cocky, a vine gives way underfoot and I dangle for one heart-stopping moment until my foot can find purchase again. Then I’m careful again for a while.

  “I met your friend the Tattersnake,” I tell Toby when we stop for a rest.

  The branches aren’t as wide anymore, though still the width of a good-sized path. The foliage is dense once again and all we can see is the tree itself, its branches, the thick covering of leaves.

  “You can’t really be his friend,” Toby says.

  “I kind of found that out. Why do you think he’s got such a chip on his shoulder?”

  Toby shrugs. “That’s just the way he was made up. All the Eadar come to life with the personality they were imagined to have, though you can change it if you want to put the effort into it. That is, if your maker doesn’t continue your story and make changes himself.”

  “Does that happen a lot?”

  “Enough to be worrisome. It’s horrible to wake up one day feeling like a completely different person and you know you’re that way just because your maker got bored with how you were.”

  I give him a questioning look. I don’t want to pry, but an insatiable curiosity has always been one of my failings.

  “Did that happen to you?”

  He nods. “More than once,” he says, not hiding his bitterness. “In one story I’m a puckish sprite. In another this wise wood spirit. In yet another, as randy as a satyr.”

  So that’s why he can seem so mercurial, I think, but I don’t comment on it. He seems upset enough about it without my adding to it. Instead I just make a sympathetic noise.

  “They never think of us,” Toby goes on. “Not all of them. They don’t care if we have no real sense of who we are. To them, we’re just something they make up to amuse themselves with, nothing more.”

  “Maybe they don’t know.”

  “Probably they don’t,” he says. “But that doesn’t change how it is for us.”

  We leave it at that as we start our climbing once more.

  “The Tattersnake was a villain in his story,” Toby says the next time we take a break.

  I don’t know how far we’ve come, but we’ve been climbing for at least a few hours. How tall can this tree be? I feel like we’re a pair of Jacks, climbing a beanstalk. Maybe there won’t be wizard twigs at the very top. Maybe we’ll find another world there instead and if there are wizard twigs, they’re secreted away in some giant’s big wooden chest, wrapped around with chains and locked with magic spells.

  I lean back into my perch. “William Kemper—he’s the—”

  “The innkeeper. I know.”

  “He says that the Tattersnake is the way he is so that people will remember him. So that he won’t fade.”

  Toby smiles. “Well, he’s certainly memorable. We’re the only two left from our stories, you know.”

  “You shared the same story?”

  He nods. “But he was always the villain.”

  “And you were the hero?”

  That makes him laugh. “Not me. I was always the sidekick.”

  “So who was the hero?”

  He gets a sad look. “I don’t remember anymore.”

  It’s like my black holes, I think. Maybe worse. Because he knows he knew it once, while for me it’s just holes. I don’t know what was in them.

  “Well, obviously you’re pretty memorable, too,” I say.

  “I suppose. But I’m not any one thing and that seems particularly sad to me.”

  I shake my head. “That just makes you normal. Most people aren’t any one thing. They have all sorts of faces they present to the world. Two people can meet and talk about someone and not even realize they’re talking about the same person.”

  “But inside they know who they are, don’t they?”

  “I suppose. Though I’m not so sure of that myself. I don’t know that I’ve ever known who I really am.”

  Toby gives me a considering look. “I think that’s sad, too.”

  “I guess it is, when you think about it.”

  “Then let’s not.”

  I look into his grinning face, all his seriousness fled, and give a slow nod. But now I’m thinking how it’s so much worse for him and feel even more depressed. To stop thinking about it, I start climbing again, letting the physical exertion steal away all busy concerns that are rattling around in my head. But that only makes me think of how the Broken Girl I left behind doesn’t even have that. The nurses in the rehab are always insisting I pace myself. They won’t let me drive myself to the point where the exercises are all I can focus on.

  I end up leading us at such a furious pace that finally Toby has to ask me to stop.

  “Why are you in such a hurry?” he asks when he starts to catch his breath.

  I’m out of breath, too, but all I want to do is keep going.

  “I’m not, really,” I tell him. “I’m just trying not to think. If I’m concentrating on hand- and footholds, I don’t have room for anything else in my head.”

  He gives me a sympathetic look. “It doesn’t go away just because you’re not thinking about it.”

  That’s what the healer who talked to Joe meant, I realize. When she said I had to heal the inside of me before the outside could be properly healed. It’s all that baggage from when I was a kid. I can’t heal the Broken Girl, because I haven’t let the baggage go. But I can’t let it go because there’s no place for it to go.

  “So what do you do with it?” I ask, curious as to what he’ll say, who it’ll be that says it. The puck? The wise wood mystic? The satyr?

  But, “I don’t know,” is all he says. “I wish I did.”

  After a while we start climbing again and I let Toby set the pace this time. The branches are now the size of a normal tree’s, but we still have the tangled net of vines growing close to the trunk for us to climb up. I wonder what we’ll do when the vines run out, but when I look up, they continue as far as I can see.

  And so does the tree.

  I haven’t seen any wildlife for ages and the birds are so exotic I can’t recognize them at all. 1 don’t think they exist anywhere else. Green birds, purple birds, red ones. Some with animal faces. Fox and lizard and mole. Some with human. Most with a curious combination of the two.

  The next time we take a rest we have to wedge ourselves into the nooks made by branches, Toby above, me on the one below.

  “How much farther do you think it is?” I ask.

  He shakes his head. He doesn’t know any more than I do and he’s just as tired.

  I try not to think of what we’ll do when the branches become so frail they won’t hold our weight anymore, but the tree goes on.

  “It’s not necessarily a possible task,” he says, and I realize he’s worried about the same thing.

  “But we’re not giving up.”

  I’m not sure if I mean it as a statement or a question, but he replies all the same.

  “I can’t,” he says. “I’ve never made it this far before.”

  That strikes me as odd. Sure, this has been a strenuous exercise, and who knows if we’ll even be able to climb to the very top, but it doesn’t strike me as having been an impossible journey up to this point.

  “Why not?” I ask.

  He looks down at me from his perch.
“Whenever I’ve tried before, the way became impassable. Sometimes the vines would give out. There’d be no handholds and the trunk would be too wide to shimmy up. Or I’d come upon such a nest of vines that it was impossible to get around. A couple of times the birds would come at me like diving swallows, except they’d cut at me with their talons and beaks.”

  “I wonder why it’s different this time.”

  He laughs. “It’s you—why else? The tree and its guardians recognize that light you carry and are allowing us through. At least so far.”

  Again with the light. I’ve never understood what Joe meant by it, though when he says that Sophie has it too, I can see something in her. There’s always this nimbus of a glow about her, radiating an otherworldly glimmer the way really healthy people radiate their physical well-being. I put it down to her faerie blood. But me? I look in the mirror and all I see is me. No light, no glow, no shine.

  “Well, at least it’s good for something,” I say.

  Toby gives me an odd look. For a moment I think he’s going to make a comment, but then he stretches his shoulder muscles and asks if I’m ready to continue.

  “Lead on,” I tell him, and up we go again.

  I’m not sure how long we’re climbing this time. I’m not judging our progress anymore either because I’m too busy concentrating on hand- and footholds, wearily pulling myself up, inch by inch it seems. So when Toby stops, I bump my head against his rear.

  “What’s the matter?” I ask.

  “Look,” he says, pointing up.

  I change my grip and twist around so that I can see past him. I can’t believe we’ve come this close and I wasn’t aware of it. The top of the tree isn’t more than ten feet above us. Past it is a sky so blue it makes my eyes tear to look at it. But the most amazing thing are the topmost branches—no more than twigs, of course. They’re hard to look at, too, because they’re glowing with an intense amber light that’s shot with filigrees of bright golds, turquoise, a deep red, and flashes of emerald.

  When my gaze settles on them, my head fills with the sound of singing and all my fatigue is washed away. The voices aren’t human. The sounds don’t come from the throats of anything I can recognize at all. But it’s singing all the same. A swell of celestial sound that would be cheesy if this was a movie, but here, in this place, it fills me with this incredible sense of humility and awe.