The Onion Girl

by Charles de Lint

  Looking at the pair, Wendy could feel a poem waking up inside her, the same way Sophie or Jilly would have been reaching for a sketchbook, or simply fixing the image in their minds to come back to later in the studio.

  Just as they were nearing her, the man did something odd. He lifted his head and sniffed at the air, then his dark gaze met her own and he steered his companion to the iron-worked fence beside Wendy’s table. He smiled at her, teeth white against his skin, and paused, leaning an arm casually on the railing.

  “I know you,” he said.

  “I … uh …”

  “No,” he corrected himself, his voice a drawl. “I don’t know you—I just know where you’ve been.”

  Okay, this was too weird, Wendy thought. If he hadn’t had the woman with him, she’d have got up from her table and gone into the restaurant, or called the waiter over. Or maybe she wouldn’t have. He was so mesmerizing that she couldn’t seem to move.

  “Where … where I’ve been … ?” she found herself saying.

  He nodded. “The scent’s still on you.”

  His companion laid a hand on his arm.

  “Cody, don’t,” she said. “You’re scaring her.”

  “Am I?” he asked Wendy.

  “No,” she said, too quickly. “Well, maybe a little.”

  “What’s your name?” the woman asked.

  Wendy turned gratefully in her direction. There was something way too unsettling in the man’s eyes. But the woman’s were just as dark—just as ageless and dreaming.

  “Um, Wendy.”

  “It’s nice to meet you, Wendy,” the woman said. “I’m Margaret, and this is Cody.”

  Wendy’s gaze returned to the man.

  “Cody?” she said. “As in Cody who owns those red rock canyons in the dreamlands?”

  Cody laughed. “Nobody owns those canyons, darling. But I’ve got a place there and that’s what I smell on you.”

  Margaret was regarding her curiously while he spoke.

  “But you don’t have the blood,” she said. “How did you cross over on your own?”

  “I went with a friend,” Wendy explained. “We had to bring a message to these guys who were camping there—Bo and Jack.”

  She went on to explain a little about how she’d snuck along with Cassie to cross over into the dreamlands and then how Joe had sent her and Cassie to the mesa.

  “And now that place is in you, isn’t it?” Cody said. “It’s got its hooks into your heart and you can’t stop dreaming about it.”

  Wendy nodded. “Something like that.”

  “Those boys are gone now,” Cody said, “and I’m not using the place anymore. Margaret and I have found us another spot where our hearts beat a little quicker.”

  “I can’t imagine any place that would be better,” Wendy told him.

  “I can see that,” he said. “It’s like you found your heart home there and you never even knew you were looking for it.”

  Wendy nodded again.

  Cody glanced at his companion who gave him a small nod in response.

  “Tell you what, darling,” he said. “Why don’t you look after that camp for me? Think of it as a permanent loan. I know I said nobody can own a place like that, but we all put claims on a landscape anyway, now don’t we? You can hold that one for me and call it your own, too. I’m good at sharing.” He grinned and gave Margaret a wink. “Hell, I’m good at a lot of things, aren’t I, darling?”

  Margaret elbowed him in the ribs—hard, it seemed to Wendy, but he didn’t react in the least.

  “What do you say?” he asked Wendy.

  “Me? But … I …”

  She had to take a deep breath to steady herself. This was all so amazing that she couldn’t believe it was happening to her. But reluctantly, she had to shake her head.

  “I couldn’t,” she said. “I mean, I’d love to, but I wouldn’t know how to begin to get back there.”

  “I’ll give you a key,” he said, but he looked at his companion.

  Margaret dug into the pocket of her jeans and brought out a small red stone, worn smooth and round from either erosion or simply from having been carried around in a pocket for years.

  “Use this,” she said, passing the red stone over to Wendy.

  Wendy accepted it gingerly, expecting she didn’t know what. But something. A flash of light. An immediate crossing over into the dreamlands. But the stone simply lay on her palm, catching the light.

  “When you come up on a doorway,” Cody said, “hold that key in your hand and put your mind into those deep red canyons. When you step through, it’ll take you there.”

  “Any doorway?”

  Cody shrugged. “Any one you can step through, darling. Between’s a kind of magic that doesn’t take a lot of preparation or skill.”

  “I … thank you,” Wendy said. “Really. I mean that.”

  “I know you do, darling,” Cody told her. “That’s why I’m sharing it with you, though if you ask me, I think you already had your own hold on it, just no way to get back.”

  That was exactly how it had been feeling, Wendy thought.

  “Now you take care of that place,” Cody said.

  Wendy nodded. “I will.”

  “And maybe we’ll see you there sometime,” Margaret added.

  Then smiling, the pair moved on down the sidewalk. Wendy watched their backs until they were lost in the crowd, then looked down at the red stone she still held in her hand.

  She had this sudden sense that the world had tilted underfoot while her attention had been distracted by the conversation she’d just had. She lifted her head, turning her gaze to the door that led from the patio back into the restaurant.

  No, she thought. That was too obvious. People’d freak if they saw her step through and simply disappear.

  That was saying it would even work.

  No, she told that little rational voice inside her head. It will work.

  She got up and went inside to the women’s washroom. After making sure that she was alone in there, she took a breath, then moved toward the door of one of the cubicles, stone in hand, those red rock canyons firm in her mind. She pushed the door open and stepped through, then stopped dead in her tracks.

  “Hol-ee …” she murmured.

  On both sides and behind her was the women’s washroom of The Rusty Lion. But before her, where the toilet cubicle should have been, she was looking through a door that led out into a stunning vista of red cliffs and canyons, pines and hoodoos, with a sky so big above it defied any measurement.

  Grinning foolishly, Wendy stepped back and the vista disappeared. But she knew she could have stepped through. She’d felt the breeze on her face, smelled the red dirt and the pines.

  Oh, wait until I tell Jilly and Sophie, she thought as she went back toward her table on the patio, red stone stowed carefully away in her pocket.

  3

  OCTOBER

  Geordie came by to see me as soon as he got into town. I think he only stopped long enough to drop his luggage off at Christy’s apartment before coming over to the professor’s house. Since he’d given up his own apartment when he’d moved to L.A. to be with Tanya, I told him he could stay at my studio until I could use it again. Neither of us brought up the fact that as things stood, he might well have the place permanently.

  Actually Geordie’s been pretty good about my convalescence. Those Riddell brothers have never handled anything to do with illness very well—the whole thing just freaks them out. I mean, Christy’s only been by twice since I got out of the rehab, though his girlfriend Saskia comes by at least once a week.

  I know Geordie felt really uncomfortable at first, finding me in this wheelchair of mine that first afternoon. Or maybe I’m being unfair. Maybe it had nothing to do with me being the Broken Girl and everything to do with me being with Daniel now. I can see he’s trying to be happy for me, but I look at him with Sophie’s and Wendy’s eyes and see what they’ve been trying to tell me all alo
ng: he’s unhappy for himself; not just because of breaking up with Tanya, but because he does carry a torch for me.

  When I think of all the years we could have been more than pals, it makes me want to cry. But I try not to let any of that show: that I know how he feels, that we screwed up and now our chance is gone. Because this is still Geordie, my best friend. I can’t let anything change that.

  “So, Geordie, me lad,” I say to him. “What’re you going to do now?”

  He shrugs. “I don’t know. A little of this, a little of that—just like always. I’ll get some busking in before the weather gets too desperate, then see if I can get some gigs, maybe put together another band.”

  “We missed your music,” I tell him. “We missed you.”

  “I missed you, too.”

  “You had to try. You had to see if it could work.”

  He nods. “But it’s weird having your failure spelled out in the tabloids for everybody to see. Before I left, one of the papers was already running a story on Tanya and her new boyfriend—you know, with the photo spread and all.”

  “You know how the tabloids are,” I say. “They just like to blow everything out of proportion.”

  “They had pictures of them necking in some restaurant.”

  “That sucks.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  We used to be able to sit together for hours, not having to say anything; other times we’d talk until our voices actually got hoarse. That’s not happening right now. We don’t have words, but the silence between us seems to require them anyway. I hate this.

  “It’s funny,” Geordie says suddenly. He turns to look at me. “Ever since you had your accident I’ve had this weird feeling that it was all my fault. That if I hadn’t gone away, none of it would have happened. I know,” he adds before I can protest. “You don’t have to tell me. I know how stupid that sounds. But I still catch myself feeling guilty all the same.”

  I look at him for a long moment. The thing is, I understand just what he’s getting at. I’m not saying it’s true, or real. But I’ve felt it before myself.

  Then something horrible occurs to me.

  “That’s not the reason you and Tanya—”

  “No, no,” Geordie says, breaking in. “Tanya and I just live in different worlds. I don’t know why we pretended we didn’t. If she hadn’t been slumming in mine, I don’t think things would ever have gotten to where they did.”

  “But you loved each other.”

  “I think we still do. But we don’t suit each other—and that’s the bottom line. Believe me, we’ve had a lot of long nights talking it out.”

  “I’m sorry,” I tell him. And it’s true. I am. I mean it.

  “Yeah, me, too,” he says, then he leans back on the sofa and sighs. “I was just so … displaced out there. I thought I’d feel different when I got back home, but I don’t. Everything’s changed. You, me …”

  “Except we’re still best friends.”

  He doesn’t say anything for a long moment. Then he sits up and looks at me, a small smile on his lips, a sadness in his eyes.

  “We are, aren’t we?” he says.

  “Even when you’re an idiot,” I tell him. “Maybe especially when you’re an idiot, because it makes me seem so smart.”

  “I’d give you a whack if you weren’t already in a wheelchair.”

  “Now you can see one of the side benefits of recuperation.”

  This time the smile almost reaches his eyes.

  “I really did miss you,” he says.

  It takes me a moment to school my features, to not let my own sadness show.

  “I know,” I tell him.

  4

  So Wendy’s gone picture crazy. Every time she and Sophie cross over into the dreamlands, Wendy comes back with her pockets full of rolls of film that need developing. Most of them are of those canyons near Cody’s camp on the mesa. Breathtaking vistas with cliffs that drop forever or rise to heights that rival the trees in the Greatwood. With towering firs and pine trees, their dark greens vibrating brilliantly against the red rock. With those curious hoodoos, the rock formations that seem to have a hundred faces hiding in them when they don’t look like castle spires and towers.

  But occasionally she comes back with portraits or candid shots of some of the people they meet over there. Puma girls and strutting eagle boys. Spirits of the juniper and pinyon pines. And of course canids.

  I particularly like this shot she’s got of Whiskey Jack, lighting a cigarette, his head cocked to one side as he looks into the camera. She’s captured that elusive blend of wisdom, tomfoolery, and sex drive perfectly.

  “What is it with that guy?” she said the first time she came back from having met him over here. “He’s got a libido as big as those canyons.”

  But she’s not the only one to be taken by those magical views. Sophie’s gotten back into landscape painting in a big way, working en plein air with my pochade box and small canvases, then using those paintings to develop larger, more finished pieces back in the Grumbling Greenhouse Studio.

  “I think I’ve got a show here,” she said one morning while she was taking a break and we sat in the studio looking at the half-dozen new canvases that were propped up along one of the worktables.

  “And when people ask you where those canyons are?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “I’ll just say southern Utah.”

  At first they were both worried at how I’d take their being able to cross over. It took me a long time to get them to stop waiting for me to get better before they went themselves and even longer to convince them that I really was okay with it.

  And I am.

  They just don’t understand how much this means to me, how it gives me something so tangible to shoot for—I mean, beyond being completely mobile again, which is the first priority, of course. I thought I might never get back there. I certainly can’t cross over in my dreams. But now I know that all I have to do is keep working at getting better and I will be able to be there again.

  I won’t deny that I get jealous twitches. But I get jealous twitches just seeing people walk around, taking their mobility so for granted.

  Tonight I have the professor’s house to myself. Daniel’s got a late shift, the professor is at a lecture, Wendy and Sophie have gone out to a club, Goon has the night off, and Geordie’s got a gig. I’ve managed to convince them all that I’ll be fine on my own for the few hours I’ll be alone. And I am, though I’m a little at loose ends.

  I try watching some TV, but it’s just boring. I flip through some magazines, ditto. I’m reading Owls Aren’t Wise & Bats Aren’t Blind; a book debunking fallacies about animals that I got out of the professor’s library. I’ve been really enjoying it, but it’s a hardcover and I have trouble holding a book its size for a long time. And anyway, tonight it doesn’t hold my interest either.

  I perk up when the doorbell sounds. It’s too late for a delivery, so it must be a visitor. I wheel down the hallway, wondering who it is. Angel, maybe. Or Mona. It doesn’t matter—I’m just happy to know that I won’t be alone. So much for resiliently hanging out on my own.

  But when I get the door open, I find the last person in the world I expect to see standing there on the stoop. I have a momentary flare of nervousness that I quickly and firmly put aside.

  “Hey, Raylene,” I say.

  She nods, looks down at my wheelchair. “Hey, yourself. I see you’re still in the wheeling around stage.”

  “I’m improving.”

  “That’s good to hear.”

  “What are you doing here?” I ask. “Not that I’m unhappy to see you, but the last time we …”

  She waves a hand. “Yeah, I know. But things change. I’m turning over a new leaf and all that.”

  “Really?”

  She shrugs. “I’m giving it a shot, anyways. Just thought I’d drop by and say how-do before I hit the road.”

  “Where are you going?”

  I can’t bel
ieve this. She leaves the dreamlands and comes to visit, and now she’s already going again?

  “Back out west,” she says. “I got me a little business out there that I been neglecting. I ever tell you ’bout that software I been designing?”

  “A little.”

  “Well, I figure I’d give it a shot—get serious ’bout something for a change. See if I can walk the straight and narrow, you know? And maybe even be happy ’bout it.”

  “Can you come in?”

  She looks over her shoulder to where a pink Cadillac convertible is idling by the curb with its roof up.

  “I got somebody waiting,” she says.

  “They’re welcome to come in, too.”

  She gives me a long look.

  “You really are some piece of work, aren’t you?” she says. “You got all this crap in your life, but you’re still cheerful, still being the good hostess and all.”

  “You’ll have to get your own drinks,” I tell her.

  “I can do that. You sure it’s no trouble?”

  “Not even close.”

  She gives a slow nod. “I’ll go get my friend Lizzie. We won’t stay long.”

  “You can stay as long as you like.”

  “Damn,” she says. “You really mean that, don’t you?”

  “Of course I do.”

  She steps closer to me and I think she’s going to give me a hug, but she just rests her hand on my shoulder for a moment, then turns to get her friend.

  We talk for so long that she and Lizzie have to stay in one of the guest rooms overnight and put off their trip until the morning.

  Interview

  Extract from an interview with Jilly Coppercorn, conducted by Torrane Dunbar-Burns for The Crowsea Arts Review, at her Yoors Street studio, on Wednesday, April 17, 1991.

  What do you think it is that makes you different from other artists? That makes you so welcome among so many disparate disciplines, untouched by maliciousness or gossip?