Moonlight & Vines (53 page)

“So what does it mean—my seeing one the way I did?”

Jilly laughed. “Mostly, it doesn't mean anything. It just is. It's like seeing a murder of crows, or a particularly wonderful sunset—you just appreciate the experience for what it is. The beauty of it. And the wonder. And how it can make you smile.”

“But everything feels so different now,” Eliza said. “It's like . . . I don't know. It's like I feel as though anything can happen now.”

“And somewhere, it probably does.”

“You know what I mean.”

Jilly nodded. “Let me see if I can remember how Christy first explained it to me. What's happened is that you've now cracked open a door in the wall set up by the rational part of your brain—the part that makes it easier for us to function in what everybody perceives as the regular, logical world—and your own logic is struggling to shut it while the part of you that leans toward whimsy and wonder wants to push it as wide open as it can go. You have to learn to balance the two, though most people end up simply shutting the door again and not even remembering that it's there. They're not even aware that they're doing it; it's simple self-preservation because living with the door open, or simply ajar, can be very confusing.”

“I'll say.”

“But not necessarily a bad thing.”

Eliza sighed. “Unless you're Sarah.”

“There's that,” Jilly agreed sympathetically.

There's something different about the boy when she comes home that night, but I can't quite put my finger on it. She's wearing a glow, but that could just be the weather. She loves the kind of snowfall we've had today. Some people get grumpy during a Newford winter; the boy only gets more cheerful. It's in the summer that she wilts.

I've finally gotten out of bed and made up for my earlier laziness by tidying the apartment and putting together dinner—a chicken curry, with nan and a yogurt-cucumber salad on the side. We have dinner and later we watch a video, a remake of
Sabrina
that I decide was much better in the original with Hepburn and Bogey, but the boy likes it.

Later, when I stop by the door of her bedroom to say goodnight, I find her looking at sketches of little round cartoon men that it turns out she
did at the gallery earlier today. I'm surprised to see them because she usually works in a much more realistic mode, like the project she's been working on for the past few months, a series of landscapes, the connective thread being that each has a ladder in it. You don't always spot it right away, but it's there. The nice thing about the paintings is that the inclusion of the ladder is never forced. Odd, sometimes. Even a little startling. But never forced.

These drawings . . . they're more along the lines of what Jilly does. Fatbellied miniature men—I know they're tiny because of the size references she's included in a couple of the drawings. A running shoe in one. Tubes of oil paint in another. They're fun—whimsical—and I find myself wondering if she's taken on a commission for a poster or something. Or maybe she's decided to develop a comic strip. There're worse things than having your work syndicated in hundreds of morning papers.

“What are these?” I ask.

“Pennymen,” she tells me. “Coins that turn into little people when they think we're not looking.”

I see the connection now. Lose the little heads and skinny limbs and they'd look just like pennies. In fact, there are coins in a couple of the sketches, which must be the pennymen at rest.

“Cute,” I say.

She shrugs and bundles the sketches together, tosses them onto her desk. I wonder again why she's drawing them, but she doesn't say, and I don't ask. I get that funny feeling again—like I did when she first came home—that there's something different, something changed, only then she smiles and says goodnight, and I stop worrying about it.

But in the days that follow, I find myself thinking about it again because the boy seems to have developed a few odd mannerisms. Sometimes I see her sitting with her head cocked, listening, when there's nothing to hear. Or she'll turn quickly, as though she caught movement from the corner of her eye, but there're only the two of us in the room.

There's something familiar about all of this, but I don't place the familiarity immediately. Then one day it hits me.

She reminds me of my mother—my mother and her invisible companions—and my heart sinks.

It was two weeks before Eliza caught another glimpse of a pennyman. She was sitting in her studio, working on a canvas, when from the corner of her eye, she saw the slow, careful movement along the baseboard. As soon as she turned toward him, the little man dropped to the ground and there was only what appeared to be a penny lying there on the floor.

Eliza put her brush down and stepped around her easel. The pennyman remained motionless as she approached it. She knelt down for a closer look and cleared her throat. Feeling a little self-conscious, she addressed the coin.

“You don't have to be afraid,” she said. “I would never hurt you. Honestly.”

Not surprisingly, the copper penny made no reply. She didn't even get a small head poking its way turtlelike out of the body to look back at her. What response she did get came from the doorway to the gallery where Sarah was now standing, a puzzled look on her face.

“Eliza,” she said. “
Who
are you talking to?”

“The pennyman,” Eliza said, without thinking.

She'd looked over at Sarah, then back at where the pennyman had turned into a coin, but neither penny nor little man were there now.

“The pennyman,” Sarah repeated.

Slowly Eliza returned her attention to her roommate.

“It's not like what you think,” she told Sarah.

“How's that?”

You don't have to be afraid, Eliza wanted to say. I'm not going crazy like your mother did.

But of course she couldn't.

“They're real,” Eliza said instead. “I didn't make them up.”

Sarah nodded and Eliza watched her roommate's features close up, could feel the distance grow between them.

“Of course you didn't,” Sarah said.

She turned away and went back into the gallery. Eliza gave the empty stretch of wooden floor a last scrutinizing look, then rose from where she'd been kneeling.

“Sarah!” she called.

Sarah reappeared in the doorway.

“Don't,” she said, before Eliza could speak. “Don't make it worse.”

“But there really are pennymen. I've seen them. It's true.”

Sarah shook her head. “No, it's only true for you.”

I know I'm being a lousy friend. I should be more sympathetic, but the boy should know that this is the last thing in the world I can deal with. I can't
ever
go through this again. It's not like she doesn't know. It's not like we haven't talked it out a hundred times before—the separate sorrows that we each had to carry and deal with on our own until that day we met. My mother and the boy's fiancé.

She got left at the altar, which is weird enough, except he was the one who wanted to get married so badly, he wanted the huge wedding, he's the one who blew it all up way out of proportion so that when he abandoned her in the church, the embarrassment and lack of self-worth she felt was exaggerated all out of proportion as well. And somehow the whole sorry mess became her fault. Her family blamed her. His family blamed her. She became the pariah in their circle of friends, none of whom would stand by her when she needed them, not even those who'd been her friends before she'd met him.

We helped each other. We made each other. Being an artist was something she'd only ever dreamed of before; I'm the one who stood by her and convinced her to make it a reality. I don't say this to make it seem like I should be getting some kind of a medal for perseverance and support above and beyond the call of duty, because she went through just as much for me. She's the one who finally made me believe I could be a normal functioning human being myself, that my mother's genes weren't going to tune me into broadcasts from loopyville and everything that would subsequently entail.

Except now she's the one who's gone all
X Files
on me. The truth isn't out there; it's on TV and it's not truth at all, it's just tabloid stories brought to life by writers trying to make a buck. The truth is we can't buy into the paranormal because it undermines everything that grounds us, that lets us function in the real world. And never forget, whatever little fairy-tale encounters we think we've had, whatever mysterious voices we hear whispering in our ears, or lights we see in the sky that can't be explained, at some point, we all have to return to the real world.

I guess the worst thing is that now there's a part of the boy that I don't
recognize anymore. Now there's a whole side to her that's stopped making sense and that scares me. Because if part of her can become a stranger, what's to stop the rest of her from doing the same?

She could become anyone. She could have been anyone all along and I was just kidding myself that we knew each other. I find myself needing to ask, is this how we spend our lives—imagining each other? Because you can never really
know
what another person's thinking or feeling, can you? And just because they're thinking or feeling one thing at one time, what's to stop them from changing their minds about it?

Someone once told me never to fall in love with a place or a person because they're only on loan. What kind of a way is that to live? I thought when I first heard that. But now I understand a little better. It's because what you fall in love with doesn't last. Everything changes. Sometimes you can grow with it, but sometimes you just grow apart instead.

Earlier I said that magic belongs in stories and that the real world isn't a story. Not that kind, anyway.

I still believe that. Only now I wish I didn't.

Jilly found Eliza sitting in the window booth of The Dear Mouse Diner on Lee Street, nursing a cup of coffee that had long since gone cold. Outside, the snow had turned to freezing rain, making the footing more than a little slippery. Jilly was on her way home from an evening course she was teaching at the Newford School of Art and had almost taken a fall more than once before spying Eliza in the window and deciding to come in to join her.

“Hey, you,” she said, sliding into the booth across from Eliza.

Eliza looked up and nodded hello. “Hey, yourself.”

Jilly leaned over the table and peered into Eliza's cup. Her cold coffee looked about as appealing as old bathwater, complete with a dark ring at surface level crusted on the white china.

“You want a refill?” she asked.

Eliza shrugged, which Jilly took to mean yes. She brought the cup over to the counter and returned with a fresh one for each of them. They were busy for a moment, opening creamers and sugar packets, stirring the contents into their cups. Then Eliza sighed and looked out the window again.

“I feel this is all my fault,” Jilly said.

Eliza looked back at her. “Don't. I'm the one who saw what Sarah can't handle as being real.”

“But if I hadn't talked them up to you . . .”

Eliza shook her head. “It still wouldn't change my having seen the pennymen. I didn't mean to ever say that I believed they were real. Not to her. I mean, of all people, I
know
how she feels about that kind of thing. But she caught me off guard and it kind of slipped out and then, well, I wasn't about to start lying to her. That's just not something we'd do to each other.”

“Of course not.”

“Lying by omission was bad enough.”

Jilly nodded. “So what's she doing now?”

“I'm not sure. I know she's staying at the Y, but she hasn't been back to the gallery in a week and she won't talk to me at all.”

“I don't understand. Was it that bad with her mother?”

“Probably worse. I think she's scared of two things, actually. The first is that the pennymen aren't real, and that means I'm going to go the same route her mother did.”

“And the second?”

“That the pennymen are real and so maybe her mother wasn't crazy.”

“But she was diagnosed—”

“By the same terms of reference that say pennymen can't exist.”

Jilly gave a slow nod. “I get it.”

“The guilt would kill Sarah. You know, what if the voices and the invisible people were real?”

“Except there's a big difference between mental illness and an encounter with magic,” Jilly said.

“But you can see how some people wouldn't see it that way. For them it has to be one or the other with no grey areas in between.”

“Too true,” Jilly said. “Unfortunately.”

“And it was so hard for Sarah,” Eliza went on. “I mean, by all accounts, her mother was way out there. Violent, if she stopped taking her medication. Imagine growing up in an environment like that. Screaming and flailing at things no one else could see. And maybe the worst thing was that her father wouldn't accept that it was an actual illness they were dealing with, so he wouldn't let her be hospitalized during the worst of it. He'd go off to work during the day, hang out with his buds in the evening, and there'd be Sarah and her little brother, left at home, trying to deal with all of this.”

Eliza looked away, out the window again. The freezing rain was still coming down.

“Anyway,” she said without looking away. “You can see why she wouldn't want to go through it again.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“I don't know,” Eliza said. “All I know is I miss her terribly.”

“Would it help if I tried to talk to her?”

That woke the first smile Jilly had gotten from her so far this evening.

“What do
you
think?” Eliza said.