Someplace to Be Flying

by Charles de Lint

  That crazy red-haired man. Ray. What had he been thinking? That she'd simply jump into the car and drive off with him? Like she'd just go along with someone she'd never seen before in her life. Except Maida had said he was her grandfather.

  Her grandfather …

  She paused in the middle of packing her knapsack and set it down by the window. Going into the bathroom, she studied her face in the mirror. She raised a hand to touch her cheek, to finger her hair. She had his dark complexion. The same fox-red hair.

  Suddenly it was hard to breathe.

  She remembered yesterday morning, Maida telling her that her mother was red-haired. But that wasn't true. She didn't take after her parents at all. Both of them were dark-haired and pale-skinned. Brown-eyed.

  She'd had a little fantasy during those first years in Baumert. That her parents weren't really her parents. That her real parents were going to show up one day and take her away. Out of the institution. Away from the ward and all it entailed, into the loving embrace of a family unit that she'd only ever been able to experience in books, or seen in films and TV shows.

  Of course it never happened. How could it? But what if it was true? What if she really was a displaced child who had somehow ended up with the wrong family? She'd always tried to be a good daughter, to love her parents, to believe that they wanted the best for her, but what Katy had told her ate away at her faith in them until finally it was impossible to keep up the pretense. The longer they kept her institutionalized, the more she felt estranged from them, and that only made her feel more guilty and confused.

  But now …

  She had to sit down. She backed away from the mirror, found the toilet seat behind her with fumbling hands, and lowered herself onto its porcelain lid. Closing her eyes, she tried to visualize the light that Maida had called up inside her yesterday. She thought of candles, of a soft glow that grew bright and strong when you paid attention to it, pushing back the encroaching dark.

  It was easier than she'd thought it would be. After a few moments, the tightness eased in her chest and she could breathe again. She leaned her elbows on her knees and cupped her chin, thinking.

  "Ray," she said, trying out the name.

  Could he really be her grandfather? Was that why he'd been so concerned about her? Was that why he'd expected her to go away with him?

  It seemed so improbable—but no more improbable than him showing up the way he had, pulling out that old-fashioned gun. Or Maida being able to cure her panic attacks with moistened fingers.

  The world outside Baumert was proving to be even stranger than living on the ward had been. The difference was that there they had medical terminology to explain everything, drugs and treatments and therapy to make the strangeness go away. Out here you were on your own.

  She got up and splashed some cold water on her face, patted it dry with a towel. Her first day at the university was going to have to wait. Until she got some answers, all she'd be doing was going through the motions of attending classes and interacting with her fellow students. She even knew who to ask: this storyteller named Jack that Annie'd talked about yesterday. The one who lived in a school bus on the edge of the Tombs.

  According to Annie, she was supposed to wait for him to come to her, but she was tired of waiting, of reacting instead of acting. She was long past due taking up responsibility for her own life. Dealing with Dr. Stiles as she had, leaving California, coming here to attend Butler were all good steps, but they weren't enough. They didn't tell her who she was, where she'd really come from.

  She collected her knapsack and left the apartment, hesitating in front of Annie's door. There was no sound from inside, no hint that Annie was awake.

  And considering how evasive Annie had been yesterday, it would probably be a waste of time to ask her, even if she were awake.

  So she'd ask Rory for directions because from what he'd been saying yesterday, it sounded as though he knew this Jack as well.

  "You can't possibly go up there by yourself," Rory said.

  "Why not?"

  "Because it's dangerous. The only people living in the Tombs are the desperate and those who just don't care anymore. You're liable to get mugged, if you don't get your throat cut first by some lunatic."

  "I don't care. I have to go. I have to talk to him."

  "Why can't it wait? Annie said he'd come to you."

  Kerry sighed. "You know who you are, don't you? Who your parents are, where you came from?"

  "Well, sure."

  "I don't."

  Rory looked confused. "But yesterday you told me—"

  "I'm beginning to think it was all a lie," Kerry said, cutting him off. "The only person in my family that I resemble is my grandmother."

  And a strange man who showed up yesterday and tried to make me go away with him at gunpoint, but she left that unsaid.

  "And that makes me feel totally ungrounded," she added. "It's like I don't even have the basic facts of my life the way everybody else does."

  "So what are you saying? That you were adopted?"

  "I don't know. All I know is that Jack is supposed to have the answers, so I need to talk to him. I don't want to have to spend any longer than I already have not knowing who I am and where I come from."

  "Okay," Rory said. "I can understand that. But Jack … he's a storyteller. He exaggerates everything and tells really tall tales. You're not necessarily going to find out anything useful by going to him."

  "But Annie said—"

  "Annie was being particularly cryptic yesterday—I mean, even for her."

  "I still have to try," Kerry told him.

  "I understand, but—"

  "And if you won't give me directions, then I'm just going to have to go up there and try to find him by myself."

  She turned from his door and started for the porch. For a moment she thought he was just going to let her go, but then he called after her.

  "Oh, hang on, Kerry. If you're that determined, I'll take you up to see him."

  She looked back at him and gave him a smile. "I'm not usually so pushy," she said, "but this is really important to me."

  Rory returned her smile. "Yeah, I got that impression. Just give me a moment to get my keys."

  She thought he meant his car keys, but it was his apartment keys he was fetching. They took a crowded bus north to Gracie Street, transferring once. Twenty minutes later they'd left the downtown rush hour behind and were standing at the edge of a no-man's land, looking out across Gracie Street at the abandoned buildings and overgrown lots that made up the Tombs.

  "Oh, crap," Rory said. "I forgot. Chloë wanted me to call Kit first thing this morning."

  "Who's Kit?"

  "My friend Lily—I just call her Kit because her last name's Carson."

  Kerry smiled. "I saw some phone booths back down the block."

  She followed him down the street and waited while he made his call, too nervous to be by herself anywhere in this area. While she was waiting, she started counting all the blackbirds she could see from where she was standing. There were so many of them—as plentiful as pigeons. But unlike pigeons or gulls, they didn't seem so much interested in handouts as in looking for something.

  Rory wasn't on the phone long.

  "She was out," he said when he rejoined Kerry on the pavement. "I had to leave a message."

  "Was it important?"

  Rory shrugged. "With Chloë, who knows? So what do you think?" he added as they crossed the street to where the Tombs began in earnest.

  "It's so big," Kerry said.

  Which was an understatement. From what she could see of it, the Tombs went on for block after block, a desolate landscape like the images of bombed-out cities that showed up on the news to accompany reports on the war in Bosnia and the like. Except here it was neglect that had finally left this part of the city so ravaged. It was so much more expansive than she'd thought it would be. And rougher.

  There were few people to be seen from where they s
tood, but those she could made her glad that Rory had come with her. A trio of grizzled men sat on what was left of a stone wall, sharing a bottle despite it being barely nine o'clock. Some street toughs were lounging farther down the block, giving them the eye. Maybe even Rory's being here wouldn't be enough, she found herself thinking. She'd almost decided that perhaps they should beat a strategic retreat, maybe she should just wait for Jack to come to her, when Rory started walking toward what looked like a junkyard and she fell quickly in step with him.

  "Yeah, it's big all right," he was saying. "And it's spreading like a disease." He waved a hand to the other side of Gracie Street where many of the storefronts were boarded up. "It wasn't so long ago most of those places were still open, but now look at them."

  "It's pretty depressing."

  He nodded. "There's no excuse for letting things get as bad as they are now. I used to think they could still make a go of a lot of these places—I mean, there's a lot of history here and it'd be a shame to lose it. But now I just wish they'd bulldoze it all and start over again. We've already lost the history. Now we've got to cauterize the wound before it spreads anymore."

  "What about the people who live here?" Kerry asked.

  "Nobody lives above those abandoned stores," Rory said. "And as for the Tombs, the people squatting there will just move on. Or we could build some decent housing for them."

  Before they reached the junkyard, he cut into an empty lot. They took a winding path around the mounds of rubble and low walls that had once been buildings, aiming for a bright yellow school bus that stood at the far end of the block. Crows rose from the roof as they approached, scolding them. Three large unidentifiable dogs lunged to their feet and began to bark. Lying on an old beat-up sofa in front of the bus was a pretty, but tough-looking Oriental woman in T-shirt and jeans with intricate tattoos running up and down the lengths of both arms. She hushed the dogs but showed no sign of welcoming them. The barking of the dogs subsided into low growls rumbling deep in their chests.

  Kerry moved closer to Rory. The stiff-legged advance of the dogs made her nervous. The crows still winging overhead seemed ominous compared to the small flock that roosted on Stanton Street—why were there so many of them in this area anyway? But the woman scared her most. As they were first coming up, Kerry had gotten the sense that she'd recognized them, had maybe been waiting for them to arrive, but then her face closed down into a mask and her dark gaze regarded them coldly.

  The crows settled back on the roof of the school bus and perched in a line along the edge of the roof. One of the dogs returned to the couch to stand by the woman. The other two stayed closer to Kerry and Rory, trembling as though they were only waiting for the woman's word to attack.

  She should have listened to Annie, Kerry thought. Instead of trying to force the issue, she should have waited for Jack to come to her. All she had to do was look at this woman to know they weren't going to find any help here.

  She glanced at Rory. We should go, she wanted to tell him, but he was obviously not going to let either the woman or the dogs deter him.

  "Hi there," he said.

  The woman didn't answer.

  "Is, um, Jack around?"

  The woman sat up and swung her legs to the ground.

  "Christ," she said. "You've really got some nerve coming around here."

  Rory held up his hands, palms up. "Look, we're not here to cause any trouble. We just wanted to have a word with—"

  "Take a hike, or I'll sic the dogs on you."

  Kerry had definitely never seen this woman before, and she was pretty sure Rory hadn't either, so why was she so angry with them?

  "Okay," Rory said. "We're going. Could you just tell Jack that we were looking for him? Tell him Rory and—"

  "I know who she is. What makes you think Jack'd ever want to see her?"

  Kerry found her voice. "Annie said he knows who my parents are."

  "Annie."

  "Annie Blue. Do you know her?"

  The woman's eyes narrowed. "What's she got to do with any of this?"

  Kerry turned to look at Rory, but he only shrugged as if to say, it's your call. So Kerry took a steady breath. Trying to ignore the dogs, she went on.

  "It's kind of complicated," she said. "Do you know Maida, too?"

  The woman's gaze went from Kerry's face to Rory's, then settled back on Kerry.

  "What's Maida to you?" she asked.

  "She's my friend," Kerry said.

  "Your friend."

  Kerry nodded.

  "I don't believe this. The crow girls are your friends? Do they have any idea who you are?"

  Kerry was getting a very bad feeling about all of this. The woman was making it out like she was some kind of monster. But she nodded again.

  "Annie didn't want them to tell me. She said Jack should be the one."

  The woman studied them for a long moment, then seemed to come to a decision. The hardness left her features and she sighed. The dogs relaxed and lay down in the dirt. The crows began to groom their already shiny black feathers.

  "I'm Paris," she told them. "I'm a friend of Jack's."

  "Could we … would it be all right if we talked to him?" Kerry asked.

  "Jack's not here."

  "Do you know where we could—"

  "He's disappeared—he and Katy both."

  Kerry felt as though her heart had stopped. "K-Katy?"

  "I thought you were her when I first saw you coming, but when you got closer I knew you were her sister Kerry." A faint smile flickered on Paris's lips. "No offense, but Katy'd never wear a dress like that."

  Kerry absently smoothed the fabric against her stomach. No, Katy never would.

  "You … know her?" she asked in a small voice.

  "Well, sure. She's been hanging around with Jack for a couple of years now and she'd come by the 'yard with him all the time."

  Kerry was speechless. After all these years it was hard to accept that Katy was really and truly real. It was so much easier to go along with the party line as put down by her parents and Dr. Stiles. When you're diagnosed as delusional, it's hard to believe that something really happened, even if you thought—you were sure—you'd experienced it.

  "Wait a sec," Rory said. "Are we talking about your …"

  He let his voice trail off, but Kerry could have finished what he'd left unsaid: her imaginary sister.

  "My twin sister," she said aloud.

  "But I thought …" He shook his head. "Never mind."

  Kerry returned her attention to the woman on the sofa. "Why were you so mad at us when we first got here?"

  "Because Katy told Hank that you'd come to Newford to kill her."

  Kerry's eyes went wide with shock. "To kill her?"

  "Well, not stick a knife in her or anything that dramatic. What she said was" —Paris suddenly looked apologetic— "that you could disbelieve her into not existing. Not from far away, but if you were physically with her and you could look her in the eye and still say with conviction that she didn't exist, then she wouldn't."

  "I …"

  Kerry didn't know what to say because she knew it was true. Not that she'd ever deliberately will Katy to not exist. It was that she desperately wanted to be normal, to live a normal life, and she couldn't do that if she kept imagining that she had a twin sister. So in a way she'd been perfectly willing to kill her off by not believing she existed.

  "But you wouldn't do that, would you?" Paris was saying. "I mean, you look so …" She shrugged. "You know. Nice."

  "I … I'm not so nice," Kerry said.

  Paris's pencil-thin eyebrows rose quizzically.

  "I didn't want to believe in her," Kerry explained.

  "But the crow girls …"

  Kerry sighed. "Why does my having made friends with them make such a difference?"

  "Because according to Jack they've got bullshit detectors like you wouldn't believe. They'd never befriend anyone who'd … you know …"

  "Kill their
own sister?"

  Paris gave a reluctant nod.

  "I didn't want to believe in her because nobody else could see her. She'd make trouble, but I'd always get the blame."

  "But siblings do that to each other all the time," Paris said. "My brother and I were always at each other's throats when we were little kids."

  "Yeah," Rory said. "But you didn't spend ten years in a mental institution because you believed he was real, did you?"

  Paris looked from one to the other.

  "Is this true?" she asked Kerry.

  Kerry nodded reluctantly.

  "You were right," Paris said. "This is way too complicated. Christ, I wish Jack were here."

  "You said he disappeared?" Rory asked.

  Paris nodded. "Maybe you guys should come back to the 'yard with me," she said, standing up. "We could talk to the others and see if we can make any sense out of this."

  "What yard?" Rory asked.

  She pointed in the direction of the junkyard. "My family runs it." She gave them a faint smile. "Not the family I was born into, but the one I acquired."

  Both Kerry and Rory hesitated.

  "It's okay," Paris said. "They're good people."

  "But if they're on Katy's side," Kerry began.

  "I don't think this is about sides, do you?"

  "No," Kerry had to agree. "I guess it's not."

  16.

  Hank was reluctant to let Lily go off on her own the next morning.

  "These guys are too unpredictable," he'd told her while they were having coffee and toast on her front porch. The kitchen was still too rank to think of eating in it. "We don't know what they're going to do next."

  "I don't think they'll try anything in broad daylight," Lily said. "And we both have stuff to do."

  "Yeah, but—"

  "I won't be long," she said, "and then I'll come straight home and lock the door and I won't let anyone in unless they know the secret password."