Newford Stories (2 page)

She took another sip of her coffee and
looked past Jilly to where two young women were sitting at a corner
table, heads bent together, whispering. It was hard to place their
ages—anywhere from late teens to early twenties, sisters, perhaps,
with their small builds and similar dark looks, their black
clothing and short blue-black hair. For no reason she could
explain, simply seeing them made her feel a little better.

“Remember what it was like to be so young?”
she said.

Jilly turned, following her gaze, then
looked back at Heather.

“You never think about stuff like this at
that age,” Heather went on.

“I don’t know,” Jilly said. “Maybe not. But
you have a thousand other anxieties that probably feel way more
catastrophic.”

“You think?”

Jilly nodded. “I know. We all like to
remember it as a perfect time, but most of us were such bundles of
messed-up hormones and nerves I’m surprised we ever managed to
reach twenty.”

“I suppose. But still, looking at those
girls…”

Jilly turned again, leaning her head on her
arm. “I know what you mean. They’re like a piece of summer on a
cold winter’s morning.”

It was a perfect analogy, Heather thought,
especially considering the winter they’d been having. Not even the
middle of December and the snowbanks were already higher than her
chest, the temperature a seriously cold minus fifteen.

“I have to remember their faces,” Jilly went
on. “For when I get back to the studio. The way they’re leaning so
close to each other—like confidantes, sisters in their hearts, if
not by blood. And look at the fine bones in their features…how dark
their eyes are.”

Heather nodded. “It’d make a great
picture.”

It would, but the thought of it depressed
her. She found herself yearning desperately in that one moment to
have had an entirely different life, it almost didn’t matter what.
Perhaps one that had no responsibility but to draw great art from
the world around her, the way Jilly did. If she hadn’t had to
support Peter while he was going through law school, maybe she
would have stuck with her art….

Jilly swiveled in her chair, the sparkle in
her eyes deepening into concern once more.

“Anything you need, anytime,” she said.
“Don’t be afraid to call me.”

Heather tried another smile. “We could chat
on the Internet.”

“I think I agree with what you said earlier:
I like this better.”

“Me too,” Heather said. Looking out the
window, she added, “It’s snowing again.”

* * *

Maida and Zia are forever friends. Crow girls
with spiky blue-black hair and eyes so dark it’s easy to lose your
way in them. A little raggedy and never quiet, you can’t miss this
pair: small and wild and easy in their skins, living on Zen time.
Sometimes they forget they’re crows, left their feathers behind in
the long ago, and sometimes they forget they’re girls. But they
never forget that they’re friends.

People stop and stare at them wherever they
go, borrowing a taste of them, drawn by they don’t know what, they
just have to look, try to get close, but keeping their distance,
too, because there’s something scary/craving about seeing animal
spirits so pure walking around on a city street. It’s a shock, like
plunging into cold water at dawn, waking up from the comfortable
familiarity of warm dreams to find, if only for a moment, that
everything’s changed. And then, just before the way you know the
world to be comes rolling back in on you, maybe you hear giddy
laughter, or the slow flap of crows’ wings. Maybe you see a couple
of dark-haired girls sitting together in the corner of a café,
heads bent together, pretending you can’t see them, or could be
they’re perched on a tree branch, looking down at you looking up,
working hard at putting on serious faces but they can’t stop
smiling.

It’s like that rhyme, “two for mirth.” They
can’t stop smiling and neither can you. But you’ve got to watch out
for crow girls. Sometimes they wake a yearning you’ll be
hard-pressed to put back to sleep. Sometimes only a glimpse of them
can start up a familiar ache deep in your chest, an ache you can’t
name, but you’ve felt it before, early mornings, lying alone in
your bed, trying to hold on to the fading tatters of a perfect
dream. Sometimes they blow bright the coals of a longing that can’t
ever be eased.

* * *

Heather couldn’t stop thinking of the two
girls she’d seen in the café earlier in the evening. It was as
though they’d lodged pieces of themselves inside her, feathery
slivers winging dreamily across the wasteland. Long after she’d
played a board game with Janice, then watched the end of a Barbara
Walters special with Casey, she found herself sitting up by the big
picture window in the living room when she should be in bed
herself. She regarded the street through a veil of falling snow,
but this time she wasn’t looking at the houses, so alike except for
the varying heights of their snowbanks, they might as well all be
the same one. Instead, she was looking for two small women with
spiky black hair, dark shapes against the white snow.

There was no question but that they knew
exactly who they were, she thought when she realized what she was
doing. Maybe they could tell her who she was. Maybe they could come
up with an exotic past for her so that she could reinvent herself,
be someone like them, free, sure of herself. Maybe they could at
least tell her where she was going.

But there were no thin, dark-haired girls
out on the snowy street, and why should there be? It was too cold.
Snow was falling thick with another severe winter storm warning in
effect tonight. Those girls were safe at home. She knew that. But
she kept looking for them all the same because in her chest she
could feel the beat of dark wings—not the sudden panic that came
out of nowhere when once again the truth of her situation reared
without warning in her mind, but a strange, alien feeling. A sense
that some otherness was calling to her.

The voice of that otherness scared her
almost more than the grey landscape lodged in her chest.

She felt she needed a safety net to be able
to let herself go and not have to worry about where she fell.
Someplace where she didn’t have to think, be responsible, to do
anything. Not forever. Just for a time.

She knew Jilly was right about nostalgia.
The memories she carried forward weren’t necessarily the way things
had really happened. But she yearned, if only for a moment, to be
able to relive some of those simpler times, those years in high
school before she’d met Peter, before they were married, before her
emotions got so complicated.

And then what?

You couldn’t live in the past. At some point
you had to come up for air and then the present would be waiting
for you, unchanged. The wasteland in her chest would still stretch
on forever. She’d still be trying to understand what had happened.
Had Peter changed? Had she changed? Had they both changed? And when
did it happen? How much of their life together had been a lie?

It was enough to drive her mad.

It was enough to make her want to step into
the otherness calling to her from out there in the storm and snow,
step out and simply let it swallow her whole.

* * *

Jilly couldn’t put the girls from the café
out of her mind either, but for a different reason. As soon as
she’d gotten back to the studio, she’d taken her current
work-in-progress down from the easel and replaced it with a fresh
canvas. For a long moment she stared at the texture of the pale
ground, a mix of gesso and a light burnt ochre acrylic wash, then
she took up a stick of charcoal and began to sketch the faces of
the two dark-haired girls before the memory of them left her
mind.

She was working on their bodies, trying to
capture the loose splay of their limbs and the curve of their backs
as they’d slouched in toward each other over the café table, when
there came a knock at her door.

“It’s open,” she called over her shoulder,
too intent on what she was doing to look away.

“I could’ve been some mad, psychotic
killer,” Geordie said as he came in.

He stamped his feet on the mat, brushed the
snow from his shoulders and hat. Setting his fiddle case down by
the door, he went over to the kitchen counter to see if Jilly had
any coffee on.

“But instead,” Jilly said, “it’s only a mad,
psychotic fiddler, so I’m entirely safe.”

“There’s no coffee.”

“Sure there is. It’s just waiting for you to
make it.”

Geordie put on the kettle, then rummaged
around in the fridge, trying to find which tin Jilly was keeping
her coffee beans in this week. He found them in one that claimed to
hold Scottish shortbreads.

“You want some?” he asked.

Jilly shook her head. “How’s Tanya?”

“Heading back to L.A. I just saw her off at
the airport. The driving’s horrendous. There were cars in the ditch
every couple hundred feet and I thought the bus would never make it
back.”

“And yet, it did,” Jilly said.

Geordie smiled.

“And then,” she went on, “because you were
feeling bored and lonely, you decided to come visit me at two
o’clock in the morning.”

“Actually, I was out of coffee and I saw
your light was on.” He crossed the loft and came around behind the
easel so that he could see what she was working on. “Hey, you’re
doing the crow girls.”

“You know them?”

Geordie nodded. “Maida and Zia. You’ve
caught a good likeness of them—especially Zia. I love that crinkly
smile of hers.”

“You can tell them apart?”

“You can’t?”

“I never saw them before tonight. Heather
and I were in the Cyberbean and there they were, just asking to be
drawn.” She added a bit of shading to the underside of a jaw, then
turned to look at Geordie. “Why do you call them the crow
girls?”

Geordie shrugged. “I don’t. Or at least I
didn’t until I was talking to Jack Daw and that’s what he called
them when they came sauntering by. The next time I saw them I was
busking in front of St. Paul’s, so I started to play ‘The
Blackbird,’ just to see what would happen, and sure enough, they
came over to talk to me.”

“Crow girls,” Jilly repeated. The name
certainly fit.

“They’re some kind of relation to Jack,”
Geordie explained, “but I didn’t quite get it. Cousins, maybe.”

Jilly was suddenly struck with the memory of
a long conversation she’d had with Jack one afternoon. She was
working up sketches of the Crowsea Public Library for a commission
when he came and sat beside her on the grass. With his long legs
folded under him, black brimmed hat set at a jaunty angle, he’d
regaled her with a long, rambling discourse on what he called the
continent’s real First Nations.

“Animal people,” she said softly.

Geordie smiled. “I see he fed you that line,
too.”

But Jilly wasn’t really listening—not to
Geordie. She was remembering another part of that old conversation,
something else Jack had told her.

“The thing we really don’t get,” he’d said,
leaning back in the grass, “is these contracted families you have.
The mother, the father, the children, all living alone in some big
house. Our families extend as far as our bloodlines and friendship
can reach.”

“I don’t know much about bloodlines,” Jilly
said. “But I know about friends.”

He’d nodded. “That’s why I’m talking to
you.”

Jilly blinked and looked at Geordie. “It
made sense what he said.”

Geordie smiled. “Of course it did. Immortal
animal people.”

“That, too. But I was talking about the
weird way we think about families and children. Most people don’t
even like kids—don’t want to see, hear, or hear about them. But
when you look at other cultures, even close to home…up on the rez,
in Chinatown, Little Italy…it’s these big rambling extended
families, everybody taking care of everybody else.”

Geordie cleared his throat. Jilly waited for
him to speak but he went instead to unplug the kettle and finish
making the coffee. He ground up some beans and the noise of the
hand-cranked machine seemed to reach out and fill every corner of
the loft. When he stopped, the sudden silence was profound, as
though the city outside were holding its breath along with the
inheld breath of the room. Jilly was still watching him when he
looked over at her.

“We don’t come from that kind of family,” he
said finally.

“I know. That’s why we had to make our
own.”

* * *

It’s late at night, snow whirling in
dervishing gusts, and the crow girls are perched on top of the
wooden fence that’s been erected around a work site on Williamson
Street. Used to be a parking lot there, now it’s a big hole in the
ground on its way to being one more office complex that nobody
except the contractors wants. The top of the fence is barely an
inch wide and slippery with snow, but they have no trouble
balancing there.

Zia has a ring with a small spinning disc on
it. Painted on the disc is a psychedelic coil that goes spiraling
down into infinity. She keeps spinning it and the two of them stare
down into the faraway place at the center of the spiral until the
disc slows down, almost stops. Then Zia gives it another flick with
her fingernail, and the coil goes spiraling down again.

“Where’d you get this anyway?” Maida
asks.

Zia shrugs. “Can’t remember. Found it
somewhere.”

“In someone’s pocket.”

“And you never did?”

Maida grins. “Just wish I’d seen it first,
that’s all.”

They watch the disc some more, content.

“What do you think it’s like down there?”
Zia says after a while. “On the other side of the spiral.”

Maida has to think about that for a moment.
“Same as here,” she finally announces, then winks. “Only
dizzier.”