The Onion Girl (58 page)

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Authors: Charles de Lint

BOOK: The Onion Girl
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“So how'd you get off of the street?” I ask.
She tells me 'bout this cop and his social worker girlfriend. About going into detox. Finishing high school. Going to university. Making friends. Finding a real life. Making a difference.
She's matter-of-fact 'bout all of this, too. There's no bragging 'bout how she done so good. She's just sharing her story. When she gets to how she and this guy Geordie come back to Tyson to look for me, but all they
find is the empty house and the burned-out tree in the field out back, I find myself wondering, what would my life have been like if we'd managed to hook up then?
“Why did you burn down the tree?” she asks. “Was it like with the paintings?”
“I reckon.”
She nods and looks away, past me.
“I ain't particularly proud of setting out to hurt you,” I tell her.
“I know,” she says. “But there was magic in that tree.”
“Yeah, you had a hundred stories 'bout it.”
She shakes her head. “No, there was real magic. I didn't know myself until today.”
She tells me about how the little dorky guy brought this wreath of magic flowers and twigs to heal her, how she used it on me instead. But before it worked, she got took to this other place, this deep mysterious forest, where she met her this old spirit. Funny thing is, she's well into this part of her story afore I pick up on how this must've been the same woman I met on my way back to being alive again.
Hell, no wonder that earth mama was so pissed off at me. I went and burned down her special tree.
“I met her,” I tell Jillian May when she's done. “Just afore I woke up here, I was in that same place with her. But we didn't get along near so well as the two of you did. She was some disappointed in me, but like I told her. She wanted things to work out different, she could've been a little more forthcoming 'bout it all. I mean, how the hell were we supposed to know what she give us?”
“I suppose.”
“It's too late anyways,” I say.
Jillian May shakes her head. “I don't think it's ever too late.”
Yeah, like I can just turn my life around now after all I done.
“How come you never hooked up with this Geordie guy?” I ask instead, pushing the conversation onto steadier ground. “Sounds like the two of you were particularly tight.”
“We were just friends for the longest time,” she says. “And now … now he's with someone else.”
“Don't mean you can't make a play for him.”
“I couldn't do that.”
I think about that a moment.
“Yeah, I guess it wouldn't be right,” I say.
Considering how she turned her own self around, I'm kinda surprised she ain't more judgmental 'bout my life and the things I done. But all she seems to want to do is understand me. She's not even trying to correct the way I talk.
“Did you really … you know, kill all those unicorns?” she asks.
“I guess. But we was wolves. That's what wolves do. You hunt. You bring down game.”
She nods, but I can tell she don't like it. I can't say's I blame her. I look at what we done, me and the pack, and it don't seem right to me neither, not no more. Sure wolves hunt. Out there in the wild country, it's always gonna be survival of the fittest. But we wasn't hungry. We was hunting them critters for the plain fun of it and then getting us high on their blood. Ain't a whole lotta dignity in that for 'em and it don't say much good 'bout me and Pinky and the others, that's for damn sure.
But it's nothing I can take back now. I can feel bad about it, and I do, but it don't change nothing for them that's dead and gone.
And we got the same problem with my sister here. I feel bad for her, too, but I can't change what's been done. I can't take back all them years of hating her. I can't fix all them paintings I cut up. I can't do nothing 'bout that burned down tree. I can't trade my life for her health.
“You know we ain't never going to be friends,” I tell her. “We don't got much in the way of common ground 'cept that one thing and I'm not real eager to sit around and talk about that sorry-ass freak brother of ours for the rest of my life.”
She nods, but not like in agreement.
“We're just too different.”
“Different never stopped me before,” she says.
“Well, I guess time will tell. You going back?”
“I have to,” she says. “If I don't, I'll die back in the World As It Is and then I'll have to move on anyway. I might as well see this through.”
“I ain't going back. That spirit, she told me once I'm gone outta here, that's it, I can't come back.”
“She told me pretty much the same thing.”
“'Cept I know there's other ways to cross over,” I say, thinking 'bout what Miss Lucinda told me and Pinky.
I tell my sister about that, run through the whole damn list of materials you need and how you get 'em and all.
“Sounds complicated,” she says.
“I reckon it's supposed to. Course there's another way. Miss Lucinda also told me you can just have yourself a sip of the blood of one a them animal people and it'll do pretty much the same thing.”
She gets this horrified look on her face.
“Is … is that how you learned how to cross over?” she asks.
Funny, I never thought about how the blood of them unicorns could do the trick. But then I realize it can't be. I might've been able to take that feeling of well-being back with me, and I guess it did something to make me and Pinky lose our sags and wrinkles, but the thing about dreaming is, you can't take nothing back 'cept what's in your head.
Course that don't explain how come me and Pinky had us the glow of youth like we did. Like I still got, I guess.
“I remember that time when I saw you as a wolf,” Jillian May says. “You were chasing this fox with the face of a little man …”
“We never caught him,” I tell her. “We never took down one of them hybrids. It was just deer and little critters like hares and mice and such. And them unicorns, of course.”
I stand up. I can see we're about to start going in a circle with our talking and I don't have me the stamina for that kinda thing. Not right now, not today. Maybe not never. Pinky's too soon dead and I ain't never been one for opening up anyways.
“You take care,” I tell her as she gets to her feet.
I know that urge's coming over her again to do the hug thing, but I can't. I stick out my hand instead and we shake.
“Where will you go?” she asks.
“I can't rightly tell. Wherever my feet take me, I suppose.”
“There are other places besides these forests,” she says.
I guess she's worried I spend too much time in the wilds, I'm gonna go feral again.
“There's a city called Mabon,” she goes on. “It's big and all kinds of people live there—people native to the dreamlands as well as dreamers.”
“Maybe I'll pay it a visit.”
She points west. “And over there, in the foothills of the mountains, there's this inn. The innkeeper's really nice.”
“I don't know that I'll be looking for any kind of company,” I tell her, “but I'll keep it in mind, too.”
She don't want me to go, but we both know I can't stay. I'm feeling anxious, some kind of pressure building up inside my chest, though I can't tell why.
“What about you?” I find myself asking. I'm about to say what can you do, but I catch myself. “What are you going to do?”
“Try to get better,” she says. “That's all I've got right now.”
A little smile touches her lips, goes right up into her eyes, and it changes her face. I can see why people are attracted to her. There's something about her just makes you want to know her, to be her friend.
“And I've actually got this guy interested in me,” she goes on. “One of my nurses from the hospital, though I don't know what he sees in me. I just hope he doesn't turn out to be some kind of serial killer.”
“You like him?”
She nods. “Except he's too good to be true.”
I think about Hector and feel that old ache start up inside a me.
“Well, give him a chance,” I say. “What've you got to lose?”
She laughs, but there's not as much humor in it as there was in that little smile of hers a moment ago.
“I guess you're right,” she says. “When you're where I am, there's not a whole lot further you can go down.”
“I didn't mean it that way.”
“I know you didn't.”
“You think there's any chance you're going to … you know, walk again?” I ask.
“I don't give up,” she says. “Not on anything.”
I know she's not just talking about her crippled body. She's talking 'bout us as well.
“Yeah, well, I hope it works out.”
“I'll think of you,” she says.
Lying in bed, not much else she's going to be able to do but think. But I don't tell her that.
“Me, too,” I say.
I start to go, but she calls after me.
“Raylene.”
I turn to look at her. There's something in her eyes I can't read. But discomfort's a part of it.
“You weren't driving that car that night … were you?” she asks.
“I wanted to kill you, you'd already be dead.”
She nods. “I … I just had to ask.”
“And ain't that a sorry thing between sisters,” I say.
“Raylene, I …”
But I turn away again and head off, quicklike, afore she finds some more words to cast out and reel me back to where she's standing. I got no more words. I got nothing but this ache inside me, getting bigger by the minute. So I just scramble on up the slope of that little holler and do the best I can to lose myself in the forest.
And I don't never look back.
I wish I hadn't asked, Raylene,
about the car. Long after she's gone up the slope and been swallowed by the forest, I keep wanting to follow her into those woods, find her and try to explain. But each time I stop myself. What would I say? The fact that I had to ask the question says it all.
I didn't trust her.
And that's not the only thing that's leaving me so confused.
All those things Raylene did were awful and wrong—I understand that, even if the canids think I don't. And while I'm not sure that everybody deserves a second chance, did Raylene ever have a first one? From the day I left her in the hell that was our childhood, there was no one to stand by her, to show her a way out. All she had was that psycho Pinky Miller, and we saw where her friendship took them.
But now that she's got the second chance, there's still no one to stand by her. When she left, I could see that so much anger and hurt remain in
her and I know she's capable of great violence. So did I do the right thing in bringing her back to life?
I don't know.
I know I had to do it. I know it wasn't just because she's family, because she's my little sister and I owe her big time for deserting her the way I did. I did it for the same reason I'll help anybody—but especially other Children of the Secret.
But I wanted to be there for her, to give her the moral support she's going to need in the days to come, just as I got that kind of love and support from Lou and Angel, and later from my other friends. Instead, I basically kicked her out of my life and now she's got no one again.
How's she going to get through this on her own?
It makes me so frustrated I could cry, but I can't cry. Because if I cry about this, then I'll cry about everything, and there's far too much to cry about. I might never stop.
I don't know how long I stand there staring up into the trees before I finally sit down once more. I really should return to the rehab. They're all going to be worried about me. But surely Joe and Sophie, at least, will understand. They know what it's like to be here. They can guess how much I dread being back inside the Broken Girl again. Inside her and trapped, and this time with no more interludes in the dreamlands like I had before.
The sound of a twig breaking underfoot snaps my gaze back up the slope, but it isn't Raylene picking her way down to where I'm sitting. It's Toby. He slides down the last couple of feet and sits on the rock where Raylene had been sitting.
“Hey,” he says.
“Hey, yourself.”
“She made you unhappy, didn't she … with all those things she was saying.”
“You were listening?” I ask.
Though I don't know why I should be surprised. Faerie have a whole different idea about propriety. At least he's got the good manners to look embarrassed about his eavesdropping.
“Don't be mad,” he says. “I just wanted to see what people who are real talk about with each other.”
I sigh. “And now you know. We mess up each other's lives. Being real isn't all it's cracked up to be.”
“It's better than fading.”
“I suppose. But we make each other so unhappy.”
“You don't have to be real to be unhappy,” Toby says.
“This is true.”
We sit in silence for a while, listening to a light wind whispering through the trees around us.
“Do you really have to go back?” Toby asks after a while.
I nod.
“And you won't be able to return?”
“Apparently not. It's something to do with giving up too much of my light to bring Raylene back to life.”
“Why did you do it?” he asks. “She was so ungrateful.”
I start to tell him what I've been thinking, about how I always try to be the kind of person who'll be there for anybody in need, but I realize that's not entirely true in this case.
“I didn't really do it for her,” I say, not sure if I can explain. “I did it for me. It didn't matter whether she'd be grateful or not; it was something I had to do for my own peace of mind. And not because of what Joe said about how if I can heal the old hurts in me, there are people he knows who will be able to heal the new ones.”
“Did it work?”
I shake my head. “Not really. I've made a kind of peace inside myself—you know, with my guilt over how I treated her. But it doesn't change the fact that I
did
abandon her—not once, but twice now. And it doesn't change what our brother did to both of us. I don't have it in me to forgive or forget that.”
“I don't know why you feel you need to.”
“Because all it really is is this useless baggage I carry around that affects not only my physical health, but my emotional well-being. I just can't connect with a man the way I should be able to. For the first fifteen years or so of my life, every man I ever met just used me. I should be able to put that aside. It's the past, done and finished with. And to some degree, I can. But not once I get close to a man. As soon as we start to get intimate, I just shut down inside.”
I don't know why I'm telling him all of this. I don't know what an Eadar might or might not feel. Toby's acting as though everything about being real is this wonderful novelty, so maybe being an Eadar really is different.
My own brief experience was so locked into the geas pulling me back to the Broken Girl that I can't tell much from it.
“Maddy once told me that trust and faith are the hardest to hold true,” Toby says. “Love itself is easy.”
“Who?”
“Maddy Reynolds—she was a character in one of Margery Bainbridge's books.”
“Those were the books in which you were born?”
He nods. “When I became real, I started to remember them all again.”
“I don't know if love is so easy,” I say. “Maybe infatuation is—but even that gets complicated when it gets too strong.”
“It seems everything is complicated when you're real.”
“I guess so. Unless you remember and hold on to the connections.”
“What connections?”
“The fact that we're all connected. Everything has a spirit and it's all connected. If you think about that, if you live your life by it, then you're less likely to cause any hurt. It's like how our bodies go back into the ground when we die, so that connects us to the earth. If you dump trash, you're dumping it on your and my ancestors. Or to bring it down to its simplest level: treat everything and everybody the way you want to be treated, because when you hurt someone, you're only hurting yourself.”
“Because we're all connected.”
“Exactly.”
“But why don't the people doing the hurting feel it?” Toby asks. “How come they keep doing what they do?”
“I don't know. Because they're not aware, I guess. But I still believe it'll all come back on them. That's why I've never been interested in having any kind of revenge on anybody that hurt me when I was a kid. I can't forget, and I don't forgive, but I do believe there's going to be a reckoning down the line …”
My voice trails off and I suddenly realize just how tired I am. Physically from our adventure in the Greatwood tree, and then the long run to reach this gulch. Emotionally from finally being reunited with my sister, only to watch her die, have her brought back to life, and then estranged from me once more. I can barely keep my eyes open and my head feels like it's full of dust and cobwebs. Only the pain in my heart is sharp and bright.
I turn to Toby and take his hand.
“I have to go now,” I tell him. “But I want you to know that you've been a good friend. You're a good person. Don't ever let anyone tell you differently—especially not yourself.”
He squeezes my fingers. “You, too.”
I have to smile. “Yeah, I guess I could follow my advice, couldn't I?”
“I'll never forget you,” Toby says. “You gave me my life.”
“Personally, I think you were always real.”
“You won't come back?” he asks. “Not ever?”
“I don't know that I can.”
“Then I'll come find you.”
“I'd like that,” I tell him.
I take a last look around. These are only the smallest echoes of those trees in the Greatwood, but there's still a magic in them. I take a last breath of that wonderfully thick and sustaining air. I lean forward and kiss Toby on the cheek.
And then I let myself wake up.

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