Someplace to Be Flying

by Charles de Lint

  "What did you say was in the car with me?" she asked, suddenly needing to confirm that she had it right.

  "You mean in my dream?"

  She nodded.

  "A fox and a blackbird—I'm not sure what kind exactly. It could've been a crow, or maybe a raven."

  "Or a jackdaw?"

  "I guess. They're smaller, aren't they?"

  But Kerry wasn't really listening. "See, this is so weird. That's what Maida said I have—fox and jackdaw blood."

  "Come again?"

  "She called it old blood. She seemed to think I have enough of it so that I can—how did she put it?—change my skin, too. That's when I really focused on her and realized how foreign she is—do you know what I mean?"

  Rory looked to where Maida and Zia were still playing with the birds. Her gaze followed his. The girls were running up and down the lawn now, arms outstretched, trailing a ragged line of birds behind each of their hands. Sparrows, wrens, chickadees.

  "See?" Kerry said, her voice soft. "Isn't that amazing?"

  Rory nodded. "Mesmerizing."

  "But no one's paying attention to it—except for us. I mean, wouldn't you be staring openmouthed at something like that if you were walking through the park and came across it?"

  "I'm doing that now."

  "It's like they can decide who can see them and who can't. Or maybe it's got something to do with this old blood business."

  "But I can see them and I don't have old blood," Rory said.

  "But you do. Maida said you just didn't know it."

  Rory sat back against the wooden slats of their bench and closed his eyes.

  "This is weird," he said.

  "I know. That's why I started to lose it when Maida was talking to me about it this morning."

  Rory opened his eyes, his gaze settling on her. "Lose it?"

  Kerry had to take a deep breath. Let it out slowly.

  "Okay," she said. "This might take a little time and maybe it'll be more than you wanted to know about me."

  "Anything you want to tell me, I want to know."

  He took her hand as he spoke, closed his fingers around it. Kerry wondered if he could feel how much she was trembling.

  "It's a bit weird, too," she said. "Not crow girl weird, but …" She ran out of words and had to shrug. "Just weird."

  "The buildup's good."

  Kerry would have smiled, but her chest felt too tight and she had to take another deep calming breath. Rory gave her fingers a squeeze.

  "Okay," she said. "Here goes. When I was twelve, I had to have an operation. I'd gone in for a regular checkup, see, and the doctor found this lump in my side, so they admitted me immediately for exploratory surgery …"

  BAUMERT HOSPITAL

  ADMISSION ASSESSMENT QUESTIONNAIRE

  Date: 5/28/85

  Info recorded by: MS

  PATIENT

  Name: Kerry Madan

  Address: 1224 Cerrilos, Long Beach

  Tel:

  Age: 13

  Marital Status:

  No. of Children:

  REFERRING PHYSICIAN

  Name: Dr. Elizabeth Stiles

  Specialty: psych med

  NEXT OF KIN/CAREGIVER

  Name: Stephen Madan

  Relationship: father

  Address: 1224 Cerrilos, Long Beach

  Tel: contact Dr. Stiles

  FINANCIAL

  Insurer name, address, tel:

  Other (specify): parents will cover all expenses

  IF PT IS TO BE ADMITTED

  Expected arrival date/time:

  Mode of arrival:

  Will be accompanied by: alone

  Ward: 2L-3

  REASONS FOR REFERRAL

  - patient confused throughout testing

  - withdrawn

  - possible bipolar disorder

  - parents report hallucinations, destructive tendencies

  - constant supervision required

  PREV. PSYCHIATRIC TREATMENT

  Peterson Clinic

  Eval. ( x ) Therapy ( x )

  Other (specify):

  When: Tues & Thurs, 11/20/84 thru 5/26/85

  Attending Professional: Dr. Thomas Evans

  OTHER MEDICAL CONDITIONS

  Allergies:

  Physical Limitations:

  Special Needs:

  Other (specify):

  RISK FACTORS

  Suicidal ( )

  Assaultive ( x )

  Escape ( x )

  Other (specify):

  IF FOLLOW-UP NEEDED

  (summarize here; details on separate sheet with signature)

  IF PATIENT NOT ADMITTED

  (summary of reasons)

  SIGNATURE:

  DATE:

  _________________

  Revised 4/22/84 F-73

  7.

  When I was twelve, I had to have an operation. I'd gone in for a regular checkup, see, and the doctor found this lump in my side, so they admitted me immediately for exploratory surgery. I was pretty out of it during the operation—well, I would be, wouldn't I?—and afterward in the recovery room, too, so it wasn't until the next day that anybody explained anything to me. But even then they didn't tell me everything. I didn't find out what the doctor really cut out of me until a lot later, when I was in the institution and got to sneak a look at my medical records.

  They told me it wasn't cancer, like the doctor had thought at first, but a piece of fetal matter that had somehow gotten absorbed into my body while I was still in my mother's womb. Totally not dangerous and it had been successfully removed now, so I had nothing to worry about.

  Well, that was true enough, but it was only part of the story. What they really took out was a tiny fossilized fetus about the size of a small crab apple—a twin my mother'd never even known she was carrying that had died in her womb and was pulled into my body during the months before my own birth. I'd been carrying my dead sister around inside me in the form of a little compacted pellet of bone and hair ever since I'd been born. Weird, huh?

  I guess they didn't want to tell me the whole truth because they thought I'd freak out or something. It's not like you hear about this kind of thing every day—except maybe in the pages of a supermarket tabloid.

  Anyway, that's when Katy first showed up. Not the dead, fossilized twin I'd been carrying around in me, but a real, living, breathing twelve-year-old girl who looked just like me, except she'd never been born. "I got lost," is the way she put it once.

  I remember I was still in the hospital, half-asleep one morning, when I realized I wasn't alone anymore. There was a girl sitting on the side of the bed smiling at me. I couldn't believe it. It was like looking in a mirror. She was even wearing the same dress I'd worn when I went in for the checkup that ended up putting me here. She took my hand, the one without the IV drip, and held it in between the palms of her own. Just sat there, holding my hand and smiling.

  "You … you're me," I said.

  She laughed. "No, I'm not. I'm Katy Bean."

  I repeated her name, thinking it was all one word. Katybean. Like Kathleen. That made her laugh more. I liked her laugh. It wasn't at all like mine, which I think sounds kind of tight. Hers was throaty, as though it came from low down in her chest. I liked her speaking voice, too. It was husky and she seemed to shape her words with a smile so you felt good just listening to her, it didn't matter what she was talking about.

  "No, it's Katy and then Bean," she said. "Like you're Kerry Madan."

  "You look just like me."

  "I know. We're twins."

  "My grandma's name was Bean," I said. I winced as I said it, but then remembered that my mother wasn't here. She hated it when I talked about Grandma and insisted that if I had to bring her up, I could at least call her "Grandmother" because I wasn't some hillbilly.

  "She was my granny, too," Katy said.

  "But you … where did you come from?"

  "I don't know exactly. From out of you, I think."

 
; "I didn't even know I was having a baby," I said and then we both started to giggle.

  We never did figure out where she got her body, but later on we decided her spirit must have been sort of riding silently along inside me since I was born because we had exactly the same memories up until the moment of the operation. It was only after the operation that they changed, that we started making our own individual memories. I don't mean for it to sound like we were one person split in two by the operation. We had a shared history up until that point, but while the details of what we'd experienced were the same, the way we felt about them was different. For one thing, she'd always hated our parents while I didn't … or at least I didn't until they had me institutionalized.

  But I'm getting ahead of myself again.

  That morning it was just so wonderful to have this sister all of a sudden. We'd been living in Long Beach for about eight months by then, but I still didn't have any friends. People used to make fun of my accent and—well, you know how kids can be, especially when you're the new girl in the school. I don't think they even disliked me. Someone just started the teasing and it became like this horrible habit.

  Anyway, we're sitting there on the bed, giggling and having a great time, when the door to the room opens and the nurse comes in. I'd turned to look at the door. When I looked back at Katy, wondering if we were going to get in trouble for fooling around too much, she wasn't there. I just burst into tears.

  "What's the matter?" the nurse wanted to know.

  "Where did she go? The red-haired girl. My twin sister."

  She gave me an odd look and said, "Kerry, honey. There's no one in here but you and me. And so far as I know, you don't have a sister, twin or otherwise. You must've been dreaming."

  That was the first clue that other people couldn't see her—not unless she wanted them to, and she didn't want anybody to see her because she said that'd give them control over her. But I didn't know that then. I just knew that she'd been here and I'd found not only a friend, but a twin sister, and now she was gone. Vanished like she'd never been. Like a dream.

  Maybe the nurse had been right, I started thinking. Maybe I had only been dreaming. She had me halfway convinced of it, only then I saw Katy standing behind the nurse, a finger held up to her lips. She grinned when she saw she'd gotten my attention and slipped out the door.

  Relief came as suddenly as my tears had earlier. She was real. I didn't know how the nurse had missed seeing her—Katy must have ducked out of sight as soon as the door opened, I supposed at the time, and then snuck around behind the nurse. I didn't know why Katy wanted her existence to be a secret, either. None of that mattered. Not then.

  But keeping it secret got old pretty fast.

  There was a lot that was good about having Katy come into my life. I finally had someone to talk to, someone I could do things with. Sometimes when she was in the mood, she'd give me a hand with my chores, or to clean up my room. She'd help me out with tests at school, standing beside me and whispering answers in my ear that she cribbed from the brainy kids. She had a natural talent for the piano, too, and used to do my practicing for me—only that backfired because my parents would hear this beautiful music that she was playing and then want me to play for guests they'd have over for dinner, and of course I couldn't. They thought I was being obstinate on purpose and that got me in trouble.

  Actually Katy got me into a lot of trouble. You can't hide an invisible person's presence in a house. Maybe no one could see her, but Katy had to eat, so there was always food missing. She'd borrow my clothes, then just drop them wherever she felt like it when she was done with them. There was that business with the piano. And since she hated our parents, particularly our mother, she was always leaving nasty surprises for them. Frogs in their bed. Worms in her jewelry box. Dead flies in the liquor bottles.

  Do I have to tell you who got the blame? I tried to make out like our house was haunted—that a poltergeist or something had moved in—but that didn't fly. After a few months of this, they started sending me to see a psychologist and somehow he got the fact of Katy's existence out of me—or rather the fact that I believed in her existence.

  I didn't mean to tell; it just slipped out. But when I look back on it, I guess I'd just had too much. She was fun—she was always fun—but she never had to deal with the punishments like I did. She never stopped to think of what'd happen to me when she was pulling one of her pranks, and whenever I tried to talk to her about it—or talk her out of something I knew she had planned—she'd just laugh and make a joke about it.

  Once it was out, the psychologist got me talking about her—why I'd wanted a twin sister, how I felt about her now that she was getting me into trouble all the time, all sorts of things. It was sort of a relief to have someone to talk to about it, except after a few weeks of my sharing these secrets with him he started in on how he could understand the appeal and all, but maybe I was a little too old to have an invisible companion now, and didn't I think it was time to start facing my problems, and I realized he'd never believed me at all. When I got stubborn about it, insisting she was real, he talked to my parents and then Katy found out.

  She was furious. We were home alone and she started shouting at me and then she went crazy, breaking windows and dishes, the TV … It was so awful. I tried to stop her, but she was stronger than me and finally I just gave up and huddled in a corner while she trashed the house.

  Naturally, I took the fall for what had happened. I got sent for psychiatric testing at Baumert Hospital then—that was my first visit to the institution that'd be my home for the next ten years or so. If I'd been smart, I would have gone along with them. I would have agreed that the move had been stressful and how Grandma dying made me so depressed, especially since we hadn't gone back for the funeral—"for closure" was the way they put it. How it was hard not fitting in at school and all the other crap they came up with to explain my behavior, but I was still a kid and you know what it's like, you can't understand why no one will believe you when what you're saying is true. It's so unfair. That just made it easier for my parents to have me committed.

  I caught on after a while and tried to pretend that I agreed with my therapist, but it was too late by then.

  It's easy to get into a psychiatric institution, but impossible to get out again if there are people who want you kept in there, especially when they've got the money to pay an unscrupulous doctor to phony up your records so that you never show any signs of improvement. They kept me zoned out on drugs for years.

  I saw Katy once at the beginning, when I came in for my two weeks of testing. Neither of us realized just how bad this was going to be for me, but we knew it was serious. Katy was so sorry and I made her give me a solemn promise not to be bad anymore, made her promise on Grandma's grave because Grandma was somebody we could both agree deserved to be loved. She also promised to come visit me as often as she could, but the next day I was committed and the drugs they put me on made me as blind to her as everybody else.

  They weren't mean to me in there and it wasn't like I was a vegetable or anything, but I learned after a while that I was never getting out—not so long as my parents were alive and willing to pay off my doctor. Whenever I started to push at getting released, my dosage would be upped and I'd truly zone out for a while.

  Of course I wasn't aware of any of that for a long time. I just thought I really must be crazy. I mean, I felt okay and everything, but these were doctors and I wouldn't be in here if I were normal, would I? And if you think about it, no one knows what "normal" really is. Not inside themselves. Everybody has crazy thoughts from time to time, or feels weird or depressed or panicky. But for most of them it passes and they carry on. But you can't do that inside a place like that. As soon as you start to display any signs of anxiety or stress, out comes the medication.

  My record said that I was a danger to myself and others and prone to violence when I was off my medication, so it's not like anyone was going to listen to me when I tried to
explain that I was really all right, it was just a passing mood, not some huge trauma. They'd just up my medication and put me into a zone state. I'd spend a couple of days in seclusion, then when I'd get back out on the ward, I'd go from half-hour checks to five-minute checks—you know, when they open your door and check up on you.

  Doctor's orders. Paid for by my loving parents.

  I'd been in there for three years before I finally found out what was going on. My doctor had taken her annual two-week vacation and I got to see someone else while she was gone. I was used to the procedure by now. But this time the replacement therapist I got for the two weeks she was away was different from the ones I'd had before. He was a young guy and not quite the good soldier the others had been since he didn't believe in following orders when they seemed wrong.

  During the first week, he decided to lower my dosage and it was like someone had unwrapped a half-dozen layers of gauze from around my brain. Not the first day, or even the third, but by the middle of the second week I was thinking and feeling things more clearly than I had in years.

  And then Katy came back.

  I had grounds privileges at the time, so I was outside, sitting on a bench by myself in the garden. There were other patients around and of course the ever-present nurses making sure that one of us didn't suddenly take it into our heads to run screaming for the walls or attack each other or something. It happened at times.