Someplace to Be Flying

by Charles de Lint

  "And you did?"

  Hank shrugged.

  "I mean, I hear what you're saying," Moth went on. "It's hard to have much faith in people when all your life everybody, starting with your own family, betrays that trust, but Christ. What a way to live."

  "You do what you have to to survive."

  Moth took another drag. "Older I get, the more I wonder if that's enough. If it's really living, or just getting by. And then I start to wonder if the walls we put up are to keep others out, or keep ourselves in, and what we lose by walling ourselves away like that."

  "That's something you can only answer for yourself," Hank said. "Same as everybody."

  Moth nodded. "So how do you do it, kid?"

  Hank thought for a moment.

  "I guess what it comes down to in the end," he said, "is that I don't want to live in the kind of world where we don't try to look out for each other. Not just the people that are close to us, but anybody who needs a helping hand. I can't change the way anybody else thinks, or what they choose to do, but I can do my bit."

  Moth dropped his butt on the dirt and ground it out. He looked out into the night that now lay deep around them.

  "You think it's enough?" he asked.

  Hank shrugged. "Nothing's ever enough. I know there's crap out there waiting to fall down on me. I know there are people looking to take advantage of me, who'd rob me blind and leave me to die in an alleyway. I just don't want to be like them."

  "Makes you think about the work we do," Moth said. "Some of those guys Eddie has us ferry around …"

  Hank nodded. "Maybe it's time for a career change."

  Moth shook out another cigarette, lit it up. He took a long drag.

  "Maybe you're right," he said.

  6.

  Saturday, October 26

  "You moved again," Kerry said.

  She'd managed to get Rory to sit for a portrait, but he wasn't having an easy time of it. They were in her apartment, Rory on a kitchen chair by the window where the strong sunlight accentuated the shadows on his face, she on the other mismatched chair, drawing board balanced upright on her lap, a stub of charcoal in her hand.

  "Sorry," he said. "It's not as easy as I thought it'd be."

  "Why do you think professional models get paid for what they do?"

  "I can't honestly say it's something I ever thought about."

  "Do you want to stop?" she asked.

  He shook his head, then shot her a guilty look. "Whoops. Sorry again."

  "It's okay. Lift your head a bit … now move it to the right. No, your right, not mine. There. Perfect."

  The worst thing about this was that he was going to be so disappointed with what she was drawing because it was, in a word, awful. But that was why she was using him for practice. The odd thing she'd discovered about her art courses at Butler were that life drawing and portraiture seemed to have fallen completely out of favor. The profs were far more interested in having the students "express themselves," which basically boiled down to slapping paint and whatever else was at hand onto a canvas and then being able to talk about it in such a way that it sounded like you knew what you were doing. Making a statement.

  All Kerry wanted to do was learn how to draw properly. To be able to get down on paper what she saw in front of her. She figured there'd be time enough to express herself once she got the basics down. As soon as she could afford it, she was planning to take some actual drawing courses at the Newford School of Art to augment the art history that made up the bulk of her studies at the university. The history courses fascinated her, but they weren't enough. She wanted hands-on experience as well.

  It was Katy who'd suggested she use people around her to practice on for now.

  "Like who?" Kerry had asked her.

  "Well, for starters, you could ask Rory. Maybe it'll get his mind off of Annie."

  That was easier said than done. The only thing Rory seemed to recall out of all the strange things he'd experienced was a conversation he'd had with Annie during the blackout, when she'd asked him why he'd never made a pass at her. He didn't even remember the things Kerry had told him about her time in the institution or Katy. He thought she'd only discovered that she had a twin sister after moving to the city, that Katy had been adopted by other people than she'd been, and wasn't it cool?

  But he did remember the conversation with Annie, and decided it meant that he should actively pursue more than a platonic relationship with her. Annie's reaction was to immediately embark on a tour.

  "I know what you're thinking," Annie told Kerry the night before she left. "That I'm making the same mistake Jack did with your mother, but this kind of thing never works out in the long term. It's better he gets hurt a little now, than hurt a lot later on."

  "But then why did you talk to him the way you did?" Kerry had to ask.

  "I don't know. I thought the world was ending. Or maybe that it was beginning again, starting fresh. I've always liked him. I was giddy with the light of the Grace and I thought he'd finally be able to accept that there's more to the world than what's sitting in front of his nose. But he doesn't. He can't. And I'm tired of shifting into my corbae skin and going through all the shock and disbelief over and over again. It gets old real fast."

  Kerry had nodded, understanding all too well. She'd come up against the same baffling wall herself whenever she tried to talk to Rory about any of it. And she couldn't even confront him with physical proof the way Annie or the crow girls could. She tried taking him through some of the shortcuts and into the hidden folds that Katy had taught her how to find, but they only left him confused and disoriented and she'd finally given up as well.

  But she liked Rory, so she accepted his foibles the way you're supposed to with a friend. She did her best to cheer him up when he got too glum about how it hadn't worked out for him with Annie, though that got a little hard sometimes. She liked having him as a friend, but she kept finding herself wishing they could be more. All that meeting other people at the university had done was remind her of how much more she liked him.

  "I think I'm getting a crick in my neck," he said now.

  "That's okay," she told him. "I'm pretty much done anyway."

  She turned her drawing board around so that he could see what she'd drawn.

  "I know, I know," she said before he could try to find a polite comment to make. "It's awful. But that's the whole point."

  "To draw awful pictures?"

  She had to laugh. "No, to practice until I get to a point where they're not awful anymore."

  "You should get the Aunts to give you some tips."

  Kerry did spend time with them and she loved their art, but it wasn't what she wanted to do. That realization came as a surprise because in many ways, the Aunts' watercolors were very much in the same mode as her mother's art had been. She'd thought that was what she wanted to do until she began to seriously apply herself to practicing and discovered that what she wanted to draw were people. Wildlife, landscapes, plant studies … they were all interesting and she liked looking at them, but they didn't call out to her the way the human face and figure did.

  "I would," she told him, "but their work's not really my style." She put down her drawing board and stretched. "Not that anything seems to be my style at the moment. But that's okay. I'm enjoying the process. Do you want some tea?"

  "Sure."

  He followed her into the kitchen, sitting on the counter while she got the water boiling, took the canister of tea bags down from the cupboard, set out their cups.

  "You're really different now," he said.

  She gave him a questioning look.

  "I mean, in a good way. You were so shy when you first moved in a couple of months ago."

  "Oh God, don't remind me. I still remember how shocked I was when I realized the apartment was unfurnished."

  Rory smiled. "But you're way more confident now. I told you. You just had to give it some time. Everybody feels overwhelmed when they first move to the big c
ity."

  "I know," Kerry said.

  Though that wasn't really it at all. Who she was today had started with that morning when Maida had shown her how to look inside and use the echo of the Grace that everyone carried in them to stabilize herself. But there was no point in explaining that to him.

  "And having you and Annie helped a lot," she added. "I would've been lost without you guys."

  She regretted bringing Annie up as soon as the name came out of her mouth. But Rory seemed to be dealing better with it these days. He only got a wistful look. Maybe there was hope for them yet, she thought. But she wouldn't push it.

  "The house sure is quiet this last little while, isn't it?" was all he said.

  Kerry nodded. Annie was away on tour. Chloë and Lucius had gone to Europe for an indefinite period of time. The only people in the house proper were Rory and herself. And of course the crow girls, who still came and went pretty much as they pleased, though Kerry had been waging a mostly unsuccessful campaign to have them respect her privacy and at least knock instead of wandering into her apartment whenever the fancy took them.

  As though thinking of the pair had been a summons, there was a knock on the door and the crow girls were there, standing in the hallway, grinning, little cloth sacks held up in front of them.

  "Trick or treat!" they cried.

  Kerry smiled. "You're a bit early, aren't you? Halloween's not until next week."

  "We're practicing," Zia told her.

  "I see. And where are your costumes?"

  Maida laughed. "We're wearing them, silly. We're pretending to be crow girls."

  "But you are crow girls."

  Zia gave Maida a poke with her elbow. "See? I told you we should have better costumes."

  Maida ignored the poke. "What are you going as?" she asked Kerry.

  "I'm a little old to go trick-or-treating."

  Zia shook her head, very emphatically. "Oh, no. We asked Margaret and she told us that no one asks your age when you come to their door."

  "I just can't believe we never knew about this before," Maida said. "Who'd have thought that you can go around all dressed up and people will just give you sweets when you knock on their door?"

  "But only on the one night," Kerry told her. "Which isn't until Thursday."

  "So we can't practice?" Zia wanted to know.

  "Well, you could practice the dressing up part."

  They both looked a little glum.

  "Does this mean we're not getting a treat?" Maida asked finally.

  Kerry laughed. "Of course not. Come on in and we'll see what we can find."

  "Ah, the sisters incorrigible," Rory said when the crow girls trooped into the kitchen ahead of Kerry.

  "We're not sisters," Maida said.

  Zia nodded. "Kerry and Katy are sisters. We're just friends."

  "Of course," Rory said, giving Kerry a wink.

  Kerry could only wonder what it would take to make him wake up and really see the world as it was, instead of how he supposed it should be.

  The only thing she had to give the girls was a hazelnut chocolate bar that was in her fridge. She broke it in two and handed the halves to them, but they both immediately raised their bags instead of taking them from her hand. Smiling, she dropped the chocolate into the bags.

  "Can we see the tattoo again?" Zia asked.

  Maida nodded. "Oh, yes, please." She grinned. "Do you see how veryvery polite we are getting to be?"

  "I'm very impressed," Kerry told her.

  "What tattoo?" Rory asked.

  The tattoo had been Katy's idea. Kerry had been a reluctant participant in the scheme until they got to the tattoo parlor and Hank's friend Paris had shown her the design she'd drawn up from Katy's instructions: a fox's head with a black feather behind it. Kerry had immediately fallen in love with it and had it done that afternoon.

  The crow girls crowded close as Kerry lifted up the sleeve of her T-shirt to let them see the tattoo on her shoulder. For some reason they never got tired of looking at it.

  "I'm getting a thousand of those," Zia announced. "All different."

  "I'm getting two thousand," Maida said.

  Zia shook her head. "You don't have room for that many."

  "Yes, I do. They'll be veryvery tiny. So tiny you'll need a telescope to see them properly."

  "You mean a periscope."

  Rory wasn't listening to the girls chatter. He had an odd look on his face as he looked at the tattoo himself.

  "What's it mean?" he asked.

  "It sort of symbolizes my parents."

  His gaze lifted to her face. "What, like a fox and crow were their totems or something?"

  "Jackdaw," Kerry said.

  "What?"

  "It's a jackdaw feather, not a crow's."

  "I'm getting crow feathers," Zia said. "Hundreds of them. I'll have them tattooed all over my back."

  "I'm getting mine tattooed on my bum," Maida said.

  They both giggled, but their conversation continued to fall on deaf ears.

  "It's funny," he said. "I don't know why I'm remembering this, but I had a dream about you one night—not long after you first moved in. You were sleeping in the back of this abandoned car and there was a blackbird and a fox watching over you, like they were protecting you or something." His gaze returned to the tattoo. "When I woke I started sketching some designs, mixing the fox and bird images up. … I wonder what I did with them."

  "I'd like to see them."

  Rory nodded, still bemused. "I remember telling Chloë about that dream, which is weird since Chloë and I never talked about anything that didn't have to do with the house. She was looking for this tin that had gotten accidentally thrown out. There were these weird black stones in it." He looked up at her. "I should show them to you …"

  His voice trailed off.

  "Do you … remember anything else?" Kerry asked.

  "What do you mean?"

  "You know, strange things. About crows and ravens and jays …"

  For a moment she saw something stir in his eyes. A memory. An image, perhaps. Then he blinked and smiled.

  "What would I remember about them?" he asked.

  Kerry let her sleeve fall back down, covering the tattoo. "Nothing," she said with a shrug.

  That night Katy came by to find her sitting in her window seat, looking out at the dark leafless shape of the crow girls' elm. Kerry lifted a lazy hand as her sister crossed the room and came to sit at the other end of the window seat. They pulled their feet up and put them in each other's lap.

  "I saw Ray earlier tonight," Katy said.

  "I didn't know he was back in town."

  "He just got in. He wants us to all go for dinner someplace tomorrow night."

  Kerry shrugged. "I don't have anything happening."

  She didn't know their grandfather nearly as well as she'd like to. He seemed to have the best of intentions in their doing things together like a real family, but when they actually got together for a meal or an outing, he never seemed very comfortable. It was as though they intimidated him or something, Kerry thought. Katy said it was just that he felt guilty for having abandoned their grandmother and Nettie.

  "But at least he's trying," she'd always add. "So we've got to give him points for that."

  Kerry did, which was why she always agreed to getting together with him, even though it got so awkward sometimes.

  "Look at these," she said, picking up the jar of black stones that Rory had brought up earlier. "Rory gave them to me."

  Katy took the jar and held it up to get a closer look at the stones. "Where'd he get them?"

  "I think they were in the pot—before it ended up with Lily."

  Katy touched the crow pendant hanging from her neck. She took one of the smooth pebbles out and rolled it on her palm.

  "I think they're pieces of the long ago," she said. "Like in Jack's stories."

  "What do you think they're for?" Kerry asked.

  "Well," Katy drawle
d. "I'm guessing they're like the corbae answer for all things strange and mysterious."

  "They're not for anything," Kerry said, having heard it often enough in the past couple of months. "They just are."

  "You've been taking notes."

  "I've got a lot of catching up to do."

  "You and me both," Katy said. She wiggled her toes in Kerry's lap. "You know what I'd just love?"

  Smiling, Kerry began to massage her sister's feet.

  "What makes people not believe?" she asked.

  "Not believe in what?"

  "Corbae. Magic. The Grace. All of it."

  Katy shrugged. "Maybe the same thing that makes them not believe in love. Because it scares them. Or they don't want to be laughed at for believing it can be real. What brought that up?"

  "I was just thinking about Rory and Annie. He doesn't believe in magic, but he believes in love, and she's just the opposite. It's so sad."

  "You should just tell him that you like him—that'd make him forget all about Annie. I mean, it's not like they were ever really an item or anything."

  "That wasn't what I was talking about."

  "I know," Katy said. "But I still think you should do it."

  "I'm going to let him work through this business with Annie first."

  Kerry stopped massaging her sister's feet. They both pulled their legs up and looked at each other over the tops of their knees.

  "It makes you think about our parents, though," Kerry said after a moment. "How could our mom not have believed in magic? Where did she think all those people came from? That they just lived in cottages in the forest somewhere?"

  "How could Jack not believe in love?" Katy asked in reply.

  Kerry sighed. "Is it going to be like that for us?"

  "Only if we let it," Katy said.

  Katy fell silent then and Kerry saw her eyes were filling with tears. Swinging her feet to the floor, Kerry scooted in close. She moved Katy's legs out of the way and put her arms around her sister.

  "I just miss him so much," Katy said with a tremble in her voice.

  Kerry didn't have to ask who.

  At least you got to know him enough to miss him, she thought. I didn't even get that.