The Onion Girl (9 page)

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Authors: Charles de Lint

BOOK: The Onion Girl
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I don't know why I don't take it worse than I do. I guess it's because I already feel so divorced from my life here in the World As It Is, that when more horrible things happen, they don't feel like they're happening to me. They're happening to the Broken Girl.
“You're sure you're okay?”
Wendy repeats the question for about the hundredth time while she puts on her coat and stows her journal away in her backpack.
“I'm not even close to okay,” I tell her and offer up a weak smile. “I mean, look at me, lying here like a lump.”
“I meant about the paintings.”
“I know you did,” I say.
Somehow, losing the faerie paintings doesn't feel like much of a surprise when I've already lost my painting arm. The truth is, I can even detect an element of relief welling up from underneath the initial shock that hit me when Wendy first gave me the awful news. Because that's one more tie connecting me to the World As It Is that's gone. But I can't tell her that. It'll just make her worry even more.
“Things'll work out the way they're supposed to in the long run,” I tell her. “We might not like all the details, and the trip's not always fun, but we'll make do. That's part of the blessing and curse of being alive.”
Wendy looks so small and sorrowful, standing there by the door, her backpack trailing on the floor as it hangs forgotten by one strap from her hand.
“God, you sound so fatalistic,” she says.
“I know. And it's not me,” I add before she can say it.
“Well, it isn't.”
I give her a sympathetic look. “I've been through worse,” I tell her.
“I can't imagine worse,” she says.
Then she's gone, swallowed by the hallway.
“I'm glad you can't imagine worse,” I say softly to the empty room. “No one should have to. But that doesn't stop it from happening to us all the same.”
I stare up at the ceiling. Sometimes when I lie here I try to count the dots in the ceiling tiles. If I can ever count them all in one tile without losing track, then I can multiply the dots by the number of tiles in my room and I'll know just how many dots there are up there. Maybe I can even figure out how many there are on this floor. Or in the whole hospital.
It's something to do when I'm lying here in the bed. It's either that, or remembering, and remembering always seems to take me too far back in my life, back to the dark ages, before my life began again.
This evening the dots don't hold my attention. Instead I start thinking about how I first started drawing. Not the pathetic little sketches I tried
to sell for spare change when I was living on the street, but further back, when I was just a child.
Sometimes I think children want to paint and draw more than they want to learn how to talk. I don't know what it is that seduces them—my memory doesn't go that far back, or at least it isn't that clear. I remember doing drawings, but not the impulses that had me pick up the crayons. Maybe it was as simple a thing as the colors. Crayons and water-based paints, all bright and impossible to resist. But I was just as happy with a pencil and an old shopping bag. So maybe it was seeing the world and having this urge to put a fragment of it down on paper. I can even remember using twigs to scratch out drawings in the dirt in the yard behind our house.
Lucky kids get born into families where their messy attempts at art are praised and cherished, taped up on refrigerator doors, maybe even put into a frame and hung on the wall. They live with people who care about them, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
I wasn't a lucky kid.
I don't say that for sympathy. It's just the way it was.
Today my memory takes me back to this one afternoon, I guess I was five or six. Probably six, because I was already in school, or at least kindergarten. We were doing what I liked best, using poster paints on great big pieces of newsprint. I remember the teacher was so nice to me that day. We were supposed to paint what we liked best and there were kids around me doing their pets or their family or whatever. I was painting this old tree that's in the fields behind our house. Whenever I could, I'd sneak out of the backyard and lie in the grass under that tree and stare up into its branches, imagining faeries.
The teacher came by and stood behind me for a while, watching me work. I'm looking at this memory through the gauze of a lot of years, so I don't remember the real details of my painting, but I guess there was something in it that impressed her.
“You have so much talent,” she said. “It wouldn't surprise me if you become an artist when you grow up.”
“I love art class,” I told her.
“What are these?” she asked, pointing to little globs of yellow paint that were clustered around the tree.
“Faeries,” I said. “But they're so small I can only show them like dots.”
She ruffled my hair. “Don't ever lose your sense of wonder,” she said as she went over to look at another kid's work.
I rolled that newsprint up very carefully and brought it home, just bursting with pride. When I got in the door, I wasn't thinking and ran into the kitchen with it, calling out to my mother. It wasn't until I was in the kitchen that I realized the mistake I'd made. It was only midafternoon, but she was already drunk. She yelled at me for running in the house, yelled at me for making noise, then wanted to know what that was that I was holding. I tried to hide it from her, but it was too big. She unrolled it on the kitchen table.
“This what they're teachin' you in that school?” she demanded. “Paintin' pitchers instead a somethin' useful like keepin' your head outta the damn clouds?”
Then she tore it up. Tore it up, threw the pieces on the floor, and slapped me for crying.
“Now, little missy,” she said. “You all just put that in the garbage where it belongs and don't you never be bringin' crap like this home again.”
That memory has never lost its ability to hurt. Not because it happened to me, though every time those events come back, I want to take that little girl I was and just hold her tight against my chest, kiss the top of her head like it never happened to me, and tell her that she'll get through this. If she hangs in there, things'll get worse for a while, but then they'll get better again. All those images will get put down on paper and canvas.
It hurts because it reminds me of all the other kids who've had that kind of experience and worse. Who are still having it today, right now, right at this moment. Children are the brightest treasures we bring forth into this world, but too large a percentage of the population continues to treat them as inconveniences and nuisances, when they're not treating them as possessions or toys.
And people wonder why I prefer drifting off to the dreamlands to being in this world.
I sigh. This is depressing me. I should just go to sleep and cross over into the cathedral world. But I'm beginning to recognize that Joe's right. My crossing over as much as I am isn't to give myself some breathing space. It's escape, pure and simple. Now that I can do it, I could just pack up and go there forever. Let the world carry on without me.
But that's not the way I'm built, I guess. I stopped running away from trouble a long time ago, Joe's comments notwithstanding. I know I've got to deal with the difficulties I've got here before doing any serious traveling in the dreamlands. The problem is, beyond dealing with the physical ailments that have turned me into the Broken Girl, I don't know what else I can do. I thought I'd already come to terms with what happened to me as a kid. I can't change what happened to me. And I've spent a lifetime doing what I can to make sure it doesn't happen to other kids.
But I guess that's not enough.
I try to move my paralyzed arm. My leg. I try to just
feel
something there.
Anything.
If my inner hurt has to be cured first, I'm going to be stuck like this forever.
Great. Now I'm even more depressed.
I wonder if I can sleep without crossing over, because any time I spend there is only going to tempt me to spend more. I'll have to ask Sophie how that works when she comes by tomorrow.
For now, I don't fight it. I close my eyes, but instead of drifting off, the paintings come. I see them floating in my mind's eye, all those faerie paintings that Wendy told me somebody trashed. My gemmin and subway goblins, junkyard fairies and gargoyles, moving from their high stone perches.
I open my eyes but the room's a smeared blur from my tears.
And then I start to see paintings I haven't done yet. Toby and Jolene, for starters. That sweet image of Wendy and me as flying animals.
I don't have Isabelle's gift. I can't make numena from my paintings—those spirits that her art calls over from somewhere else and clothes with bodies that can move and interact with people in the World As It Is so long as their paintings remain intact. It's like she opens a door between the worlds with the way she uses her pigment. But something is still born from my work. It might not literally bring spirits to life like Isabelle's paintings can, but it still does something. If nothing else, it reminds people that everything has a spirit, even an empty lot or a trashed car. Or maybe it reminds them of what it was like to see the world as a kid, which isn't such a bad thing either. We could stand a little more wide-eyed innocence in the world.
I live and breathe art. I can't imagine not being able to do it. Where other people write in journals to mark the passages of their lives, I use my sketchbooks. When you flip through them you don't get a sense of story
the way you do with Mona's comics. Two of her strips, “My Life As a Bird” and the shorter “Spunky Girl” that runs every week in
In the City
, are literally a day-to-day commentary on what happens in her life.
But the stories in my sketchbooks are there for me to see. I can look at a page and call back exactly where I was when I did it, what I was thinking, what I was feeling, what was going on in my life. I started keeping a sketchbook when I was in university and until this hospital stay, there hasn't been a day gone by that I didn't draw something in whatever one was currently on the go.
That's gone now. It's all gone. Art can't be a journey for me anymore. It can only be something that other people do, a journey they take, and all I can do is watch them go. See what they bring back.
I'm weeping in earnest now. I can't stop. I can't even blow my nose. I start to choke on the buildup of phlegm, but I'm too embarrassed to call for a nurse. I manage to turn my head and cough the mucus out onto the pillow beside me. It oozes down my neck, onto my shoulder. But that doesn't help. I still feel like I'm choking.
Finally, I bury my pride and push the call button for a nurse.
I just can't stop crying.
MANIDÒ-AKÌ,
1999
There are no maps in the
spiritworld. When the Great Spirit decided to make
manidò-akì,
I guess she wasn't thinking about us needing to find anything specific in here. What she gave us was just a patchwork quilt of spirit lands and dreamlands and the
manidò-tewin,
the spirit homes of everything that lives or ever has lived in the World As It Is: animal, vegetable, mineral; waterway, landscape, building. Everything's got its own
manidò-tewin
here. Some people call them
abinàs-
odey
, a heart home, your own piece of the quilt that's as familiar to you as your own heartbeat, the one place that's always going to be yours.
But the deeper you go, the wilder and more unpredictable the landscape becomes. Go far enough and it's like you're on some other planet where the natural laws all run counter to everything you know.
Places like Sophie's Mabon, the minutes tick away pretty much at the same rate they do in the World As It Is. Connecting these kinds of regions is a spiderweb of paths that stick to the same timeline that the two worlds can share. Work at it and you can also find other, secret roads where the
hours stand still, or fold back in on themselves so that no time passes from when you step on the trail to when you get off again. There's places like that, too, small acres and whole territories, even. The Greatwood—that echo of the first forest where Jilly's been spending so much of her dreaming time—is one of them. But stray beyond those trails and timeless regions, and you don't know what you'll find.
Mostly it's quicklands, places where time runs faster than it does in the World As It Is. You can spend a year there and only minutes pass by in the world you've left behind. But there are tracts of slowtime, too. Stay overnight in one of them and you could come back like Rip Van Winkle to find that a hundred years have gone by. Not a good idea if you've left anything you care about back in the World As It Is.
People like me, we can smell the difference. I stay out of the slowtime pockets because there's too much I like waiting for me in the world I leave behind. If I've got to move through the wild, I try to go by the quicklands. With my blood, I've got the time to spare. I'm not immortal, but we're a long-lived people. It's in the blood, but it's also a side effect of spending time in this place. Something in the air, I guess.
But though time can stand still, or even run backward in
manidò-akì,
it just keeps marching on in the World As It Is. So when I leave Jilly in the Greatwood, I stick to the secret roads, covering as much ground as I can in an ever-widening spiral. I'm hoping for a quick end to this. I don't expect to just run into the woman I'm looking for, but if I'm lucky, I'll hear some gossip, catch a whiff of news that'll lead me to her.
I'm not lucky.
I don't want to brag, but I'm good at this, navigating
manidò-akì,
finding people, places, things. Some of us just have a knack for it and I've been doing it for a long time. But it can take patience, and time, and I'm running out of time so far as Jilly's concerned. The way she's feeling these days, she's liable to just cut the thread, thinking she's going full-time into the dreamlands, but all she'll be doing is finishing this lifetime and moving on to what comes next.
So after a couple of days of this, I take myself back to the World As It Is to get some guidance. I can read the bones, but I can't throw them for myself—they're like any augury system; they just don't work as well when you use them for yourself. I need someone else to do a reading for me.
Cassie looks up and smiles when I step out of the bedroom of our apartment. Time was, and not so long ago, we just made do with squats. We were nomads, living half in this world, half in
manidò-akì.
Everything we owned we could carry on our backs. We'd camp out in the dreamlands, find ourselves an abandoned building to squat in whenever we got back to the city.
But Cassie's been getting the nesting instinct lately. She wants babies. She wants a cabin in the hills, a bottle tree out front to scare off the witches and welcome the spirits, just like the tree the old woman had—the one who gave her the cards. I'll make sure it happens, just like I make sure she spends time in the spiritworld to stretch out the years she's been allotted for this lifetime. For now we make do with a basement apartment in the north end of Upper Foxville, but it's already filled up with more things than we could fit in the back of a pickup truck. Mind you, we don't have any kind of a vehicle either.
“Hey, stranger,” she says and comes over to give me a hug. “I've missed you.”
“I've missed you, too.”
How could I not? There's a comfort and love in these arms that I won't ever find anywhere else, not in this world or any other. I was never much for believing in soul mates until I met her.
She still looks to be in her mid-thirties, a dark-eyed, beautiful woman with coffee-colored skin and hair that hangs in a hundred little beaded braids. Always one for the subtle colors, tonight she's wearing a pair of purple sweatpants and a hot-pink T-shirt. Her sneakers are bright yellow. That's my Cassie, always blends into a crowd.
“So did you have any luck finding your grandmother?” she asks.
Nokomis isn't my grandmother. It's just what the People call her. But I don't bother correcting Cassie.
“Not yet,” I say. “That's why I need your help.”
“I'll get the cards,” she tells me.
They don't look like much, these cards of hers that were handed down to her by that old black woman in the cabin with the bottle tree. Cassie's got other, fancy Tarot cards that she uses for regular readings, like when we're out on the streets doing our fortune-telling shtick. These are different. Battered cards with a blue floral pattern on the backs, held together with a rubber band, face sides all blank.
We sit down on either side of the coffee table. Cassie pulls the elastic
off. She fans the cards out and offers them to me, face side down. I know the drill. I let my need fill me. I attune myself to it and the spirit that fills the room—mine, Cassie's, the one that flows between us. Then I take three of the cards, one at a time.
The first card's blank face starts to shimmer and an image appears, showing a dog with a coyote shape to its body, its mottled fur a half-dozen shades of brown and muted red and ocher. It's got a crow's head and seems to be trotting through the bush down some game trail.
“Me, I guess,” I say.
“You recognize where you are?” Cassie asks.
I shake my head. “Probably
manidò-akì.
”
“Past or present?”
“No difference, really,” I say with a short laugh. “I've been there and I'll be going back. What I'm looking for is some guidance on
where
to go.”
Cassie nods and we study the second card. The image taking shape there shows a pack of wolves worrying at what looks like the flank of a white horse. All we can see is the dead animal's hindquarters. There are crows and ravens nearby, waiting their turn.
I look up at Cassie. “Any ideas?”
“Cousins?” she asks. “Maybe they can direct you?”
“And the horse?”
She shakes her head. “It might not mean anything beyond the fact that the ones that can help you will have just made a kill. You know how literal the images can be.”
“I suppose.”
I get a bad feeling from that card, but nothing I can put my finger on. Maybe it's just the dog in me. Horses and dogs, we've both been partners to humans, which kind of makes us kin to each other as well. Doesn't feel right, feeding on kin.
I study that second card for a moment longer, then turn my attention to the third one. The image on this card shows a full moon, reflected in the dark water of a seep-fed pool that's high on some mountaintop in red rock country. As I study the image, I can see time passing on the lower slopes, the seasons flowing one into the other. There's only one place I've ever seen them do that.
“That's in the quicklands,” I say.
“And the reflection of the moon?”
“You don't get more earthbound than Nokomis, but she always did have a fondness for lunar imagery. Her contact with the Grandfather Thunders, I guess.”
Cassie straightens up and looks at me across the table.
“Does this help at all?” she asks.
“Indirectly. I thought she'd be deep in the wild. This just confirms it.”
“You know the cards,” Cassie says. “They expect you to help yourself as much as they help you.” She picks up the cards, shuffles them, just the three. “We could try again.”
“No,” I say. “I can tell this is about as clear as it's going to get. Looks like I've got some hard traveling ahead of me. The quicklands pretty much go on forever.”
Cassie returns the cards to the deck and wraps the rubber band around them again. I enjoy watching the quick, easy movement of her fingers.
“This could take some time,” I add. “Sure you won't come with me?”
She shakes her head. “I'm filling in with Laura at the hospice. They're still short-staffed.”
“I thought you'd gotten some new volunteers.”
“We did, but they're too sick to do much, and everybody else seems to think they're going to catch the disease by working there.”
“Idiots.”
“Mmm. You want me to pack you some food?”
I look at her sitting there across the table. I don't know how long I'll be gone, but any amount of time is too long.
“Thought I'd wait until the morning to leave,” I say.
A slow smile builds on her lips, then spreads across her face. She doesn't say a word. Just takes me by the hand and leads me into the bedroom.
In the morning, I've got frybread, beans, and a pair of big mugs of coffee ready by the time Cassie comes wandering in from out of the bedroom. She rubs the sleep from her eyes and gives the coffee an approving look.
“This is why I keep you,” she tells me.
“And here I thought it was for my superior dancing skills.”
“You are a good dancer, actually.”
“Ya-ha-hey,” I tell her and dance a plate of breakfast over to the table for her.
She's wearing an oversized, tie-dyed T-shirt as a nightie this morning that's so bright it makes my eyes water. When I blink, I see beadwork patterns instead of stars. Cassie takes an appreciative sip of her coffee, then looks at me over the rim.
“Did Jilly say anything about her paintings when you were talking to her?” she asks.
“Nothing specific. I know it's driving her crazy that she can't even pick up a pencil where she is in the hospital.”
“Somebody broke into her studio and destroyed all her faerie paintings.”
My worry for Jilly goes up a couple of notches. Something like that might be all she needs to send her off into the dreamlands for good.
“How's she taking it?” I ask.
“No one's told her yet.”
“That's good.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” Cassie says. “I think she should know. It'll hurt, but knowing the truth is always better in the long run. And it might harden her resolve to get serious about healing herself.”
“If it doesn't drive her deeper into
manidò-akì.
”
“I think she's stronger than that.”
I give a slow nod. “I hope you're right.”
“But there was something funny in her studio,” Cassie goes on. “I got the key from Sophie and had a look around before I came home last night. You know, to see if I could pick up any sign the vandals might have left behind.”
Cassie's a sensitive as well as a card reader. When she talks about sign, she's talking about spirit traces that most people would never feel. She can read people and places better than most of the cousins I know.
“What did you find?” I ask.
Cassie doesn't answer immediately. I know she's going back to the studio in her head, looking for the right words to explain what she'd felt when she was there.
“You know there's that brightness in Jilly,” she says finally.
“Like a star sometimes,” I say, “and I still don't know what it is. The glow of a big spirit, I'm guessing. Big and strong.”
Cassie nods. “Whoever trashed her paintings was just as strong, but instead of a brightness she—I'm pretty sure it was a she—has a dark light burning in her. But the weird thing is that the sign she left behind could have been left by Jilly.”

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