Someplace to Be Flying (32 page)

“What sort of pill was it?” Maida asked. “In your dream, I mean.”

“Something to make me feel normal.”

“They have pills that can do that?”

“It depends on how you define ‘normal,’ ” Kerry told her.

“Sometimes we wonder what it’s like to feel normal,” Maida said. “You know, like all the people you see out on the streets or sitting in their little boxy homes.”

Kerry gave her a curious glance. Were the crow girls supposed to be on some sort of medication? That might explain how they looked to be almost Kerry’s own age, but acted so young.

“But then,” Maida went on, “we see how boring they are and we’re happy to be the way we are.”

Was that how she should approach her own life? Kerry wondered. Stop trying to fit and just see where the hallucinations took her?

“You know what else you do?” Maida said.

Kerry shook her head.

“Sometimes you grind your teeth.”

That called up a partial memory. Hadn’t she dreamt that someone had told her to stop doing that … was it last night? It was. And the more she thought about it, the more she was sure she’d dreamt it, not this morning, but much earlier than that, just when she was falling asleep.

Kerry frowned. “How long were you sitting by my bed?”

“Oh, hours and hours.”

Kerry looked at her, troubled. The issue of her privacy lay between them again. She’d been enjoying Maida’s company so much that she’d forgotten the need to address this bad habit of the twins. She didn’t like the idea of anyone, even when they were as sweet as the crow girls, wandering about her apartment whenever they felt like it. Going through her things, few though they were. Sitting beside her bed and watching her sleep.

“You shouldn’t do that,” she said. “It’s not right to sneak into people’s houses uninvited and spy on them.”

“Why not?”

It was yesterday morning all over again. The question appeared to spring from an innocence so profound, Kerry didn’t know how she could even begin to explain.

She settled on, “It’s just not polite. Would you like it if people did that to you?”

“People do it all the time,” Maida said. “They’re always poking about in our nests or cutting down our trees.”

Kerry sighed. “You’re not a real bird.”

She felt like her therapist back in Long Beach as soon as the words came out, could almost hear the woman’s tight voice.
These things you’re seeing, Kerry, you do understand that they’re not real, don’t you?
Her therapist hadn’t been big on self-discovery, preferring to tell Kerry what she was supposed to be thinking and feeling.

“I know
that,” 
Maida said.

“Good,” Kerry told her. The toast popped up and she went to get it. Returning to the table, she went on, “Playacting can be fun, but if you—”

“I’m a corbæ.”

The interruption took Kerry off-guard. “A what?”

“A corbæ,” Maida repeated. “We were here first,” she explained patiently. “You know, long before Cody stirred you out of the pot.”

Kerry shook her head. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“But you have lots of the old blood in you.”

Something froze inside Kerry and she was remembering her grandmother talking to her one day while they sat out on the porch of the old farmhouse.

We’ve got an old blood,
she’d said.
We’ve been walking this land for a long time. You can see it in our eyes and our skin.

Kerry had always thought she meant that they were descended from Indians.

“What do you mean by … old blood?” she asked.

“Fox from your mother, jackdaw from your father. Didn’t you
know?”

“No. I … what does it mean?”

Maida laughed. “It doesn’t mean anything except that’s who you are.”

Kerry’s toast lay forgotten on her plate, cold. She looked across the table at the small girl perched on the other chair and seemed to see the true foreignness of her for the first time.

“So you really … are a crow?” she found herself asking.

“Nonono. I already told you. I’m a corbæ and that makes me older than any old crow. But I can look like a crow when I want to.”

“When you want to,” Kerry repeated.

“Sure,” Maida said. “And since you’ve got lots of old blood in you, oh ever so lots, you can probably change your skin, too.” Then she started to giggle “But what would you be? A black fox with wings? A red crow with a big bushy tail?” She couldn’t control her giggles. “Oh, this is too funny.”

But Kerry didn’t find it funny at all. Because the more she listened to Maida prattle on, the less she could believe the girl was real. Which meant Kerry was just imagining she was here, saying all these confusing things. Imagining crow girls the way she imagined she had a—

“What’s so very wrong?” Maida asked, giggles replaced with a sudden con? cern.

Kerry couldn’t look at her. She stared at her cold toast, trying to regain her equilibrium, but the plate and the table appeared to recede, slipping further and further away from her range of vision, the more she tried to focus on them.

“I … I should never have come here,” she said in a small, tight voice.

She tried to hang on to now, to being here, in this place, but it was too hard.

“I should never have left. I was safe there. They were right. I can’t take care of myself. I just can’t… .”

She was dimly aware of Maida hopping up onto the table, the table teetering precariously under her weight, then the crow girl was sitting in her lap, blocking her view. She had a moment’s respite from the horribly disconcerting view of the receding table. Her gaze was so close to Maida’s that the crow girl’s deep, dark eyes were all she could see. But she could still feel the world falling away around them, dissolving into whirling shadows. The world was falling away, and molecule by molecule, she was falling away with it.

Maida put two fingers to her lips and licked them, then put them against Kerry’s brow. Light flared in Kerry’s eyes, banishing the shadows, drawing all the fragments of herself and the world back together again. It happened with such a suddenness that for a moment Kerry couldn’t breathe.

“Do you feel better now?” Maida asked.

Kerry could feel the crow girl’s sweet breath on her face when Maida spoke. She seemed to weigh next to nothing, sitting there on her lap, hands on Kerry’s shoulders now, brow furrowed, gaze peering worriedly into Kerry’s eyes. Kerry couldn’t imagine why she’d thought the girl was another hallucination, why she’d let herself get carried away as she had. Maida had so much physical presence it was impossible to think of her as anything but real and here.

And when she stopped to think about it, she wasn’t alone in seeing and interacting with Maida—Maida and Zia, both. Rory knew they existed. As did Annie. So the girl on her lap was real. But Maida being real didn’t explain how she’d been able to stop Kerry’s panic attack with no more than a touch of her fingers. Kerry could still feel the light Maida had woken inside her. All the hurt and lost and scared pieces of her clustered like moths around the bright and comforting warmth of that light and were transformed so that she felt strong.

“What did you do?” she asked.

Maida slipped from her lap and skipped back to her perch on the opposite chair.

“Happy magic,” she said. “You were turning all dark and coming apart so I called up a light to glue you back into place.”

“Just like that.”

Maida nodded. “Quickquick seemed best.”

“But magic … ?”

“Is it the wrong word?” Maida asked.

“It’s not that. It’s just … it all seems so impossible.”

“Then call it medicine.”

“I don’t know,” Kerry said. “It doesn’t feel like any medicine I ever took before.” She raised a hand to her forehead. “It really does feel like a light, shining inside me. How did you put it there?”

Maida laughed. “You’re so funny! I didn’t put it there. Nobody can do that—not even Raven.”

“But—”

“It was always there. I just made it a little brighter so that you could find it.”

Kerry regarded her for a long moment. It was so strange to see the world as calmly as she did at the moment, without the edge that was usually present.

“Always?” she said.

Maida nodded.

“How can I make sure I don’t lose it again?” she asked.

“You can’t. But paying attention to it helps. Crazy Crow says that’s a magic all in itself. Paying attention, I mean. It’s like touching a piece of the long ago.”

Kerry didn’t think she was ever going to be able to make sense out of Maida’s convoluted logic. Every time the crow girl explained something, Kerry only felt more confused. But she wanted to understand.

“What’s the long ago?” she asked.

“You know, where the forever trees grow. The place we first stepped into from the medicine lands. Remember?”

Kerry shook her head. “I wasn’t there.”

“Oh. I forgot. Do you ever forget things?”

“Sometimes not as much as I’d like to.”

“I know just what you mean,” Maida said. “When your head gets all filled up with this and that, it feels like there’s hardly room for anything new to come in, doesn’t it?”

“I suppose.”

Though that hadn’t been at all what Kerry had meant. “Sometimes,” Maida said, “I scrunch my eyes and try to forget as much as I can so that everything seems new and strange again. Do you ever do that?” Kerry shook her head.

“You should
try
it. It’s fun.” Maida paused. “But you don’t ever really forget anything, you know. It’s always hiding away somewhere, in some little corner, and pops out just when you’re not expecting it at all. But that can be fun, too.” She held out her empty mug. “Can I have more tea?”

Kerry blinked at the sudden switch in topic. Then she focused on the proffered mug. The “tea” was all gone except for a few grains of sugar left on the rim.

“You … um, drank it all already?” she said. “It was only one cup.”

Kerry hesitated, then went to the counter and filled the mug up with sugar again.

“Thanks,” Maida said. “Your toast’s gone all cold.” “I’ll put some more on.”

“Don’t throw that away,” Maida said as Kerry was about to toss out the cold toast. “We can feed it to the little cousins down the street. They’re very fond of toast, you know. It doesn’t matter how hard or cold it’s gone.”

Kerry laid the toast on the counter and put a couple of slices of fresh bread in the toaster. Pouring out her cold tea in the sink, she made herself a fresh mug.

“So these cousins,” she said. “They’re corbæ, too?” “Oh, no. They’re just birds.” “Are there many corbæ here?”

“Oh, ever so many. Jolene calls it the City of Crows because there’s so many of us living here. There’s me and Zia and Annie and—” “Annie’s a crow girl, too?”

Maida laughed. “As if. She’s a jay—couldn’t you tell?” “No. I … what about Rory?”

“He’s like you. He has the blood, but doesn’t know it.” Then Maida grinned. “Except I told you, so now you do know it, don’t you?” “You weren’t serious, were you?”

She remembered Maida telling her she’d gotten fox blood from her mother, jackdaw from her father, but she couldn’t imagine it in either of them.

“I’m always ever so very serious,” Maida said, licking at her “tea.” She had a white dusting of sugar in either corner of her mouth and on her lower lip. “Can’t you tell?”

Kerry smiled. “Not really.”

She had a sip of her own, liquid, tea. When the toast popped, she fetched it from the toaster and brought it back to the table.

“I don’t understand what you mean about my parents having had animal blood,” she said as she buttered her toast.

“What’s not to understand?”

Everything, Kerry thought.

She spread jam on her toast and took a bite.

“Well, for starters,” she said when she’d swallowed, “how does animal blood show itself? Or does it even show itself? I mean, I have red hair, so is that from this fox blood?”

Maida nodded.

“But my mother didn’t have red hair.”

“Yes, she did. I’m remembering that particularly well.”

“You knew my mother, too?”

“Didn’t I?” Maida asked, looking as bewildered as Kerry felt.

Kerry shook her head. This was far too confusing for her.

“I don’t know,” she said.

Maida put her mug down on the table and hopped down to the floor.

“We should go ask Zia,” she said. “Maybe she remembers. And then we could go feed the cousins your old toast.”

Sure, Kerry thought. Why not? The day was already so off-kilter that she might as well simply give up and go with the flow.

She plucked at the oversized T-shirt she was wearing as a nightie.

“Let me finish my breakfast and get dressed first,” she said.

Fifteen minutes later the pair of them came down the stairs, Maida in the lead, carrying the toast in a paper bag. The door to Rory’s apartment was open and Kerry had the sudden urge to talk to him about all of this. Maybe he could make some sense out of it. But as soon as she paused by the door, Maida was tugging on her arm.

“Come on,” she said. “They’re being ever so too serious in there.”

Before Kerry could ask who was being so serious, Maida had pulled her onto the porch, down the stairs, and out onto the lawn. Sticking the paper bag under her arm, Maida cupped her hands and called for Zia. With both of them looking up into the trees for the other crow girl, neither of them paid much attention to the Ford Escort that pulled up to the curb. It wasn’t until the tall red-haired man got out of the car and spoke her name that Kerry turned to look at him.

“Yes?” she said.

He gave Maida a wan? glance before returning his attention to her.

“Look,” he said. “I know how this is going to sound, but you have to come with me.”

Kerry shook her head and backed toward the house. “I don’t think so.”

“I don’t know what they’ve told you, but the longer you stay here, the more danger you’re in.”

“You stay back,” she said as he took a step toward her.

He immediately stopped moving forward and held his hands out to her palms up, face earnest, conciliatory.

“It’s not what you’re thinking,” he said. “I’m here to help you.”