The Very Best of Charles De Lint

  “Right.”

  “Okay. A little pale today, but still.”

  Heather shook her head. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this. I haven’t told anybody.”

  “Not even your mom or your sister?”

  “Nobody. It’s…”

  She could feel tears welling up, the vision blurring, but she made herself take a deep breath. It seemed to help. Not a lot, but some. Enough to carry on. How to explain why she wanted to keep it a secret? It wasn’t as though it was something she could keep hidden forever.

  “I think I feel like a failure,” she said.

  Her voice was so soft she almost couldn’t hear herself, but Jilly reached over

  and took her hand.

  “You’re not a failure. Things didn’t work out, but that doesn’t mean it was your fault. It takes two people to make or break a relationship.”

  “I suppose. But to have put in all those years…”

  Jilly smiled. “If nothing else, you’ve got two beautiful daughters to show for them.”

  Heather nodded. The girls did a lot to keep the emptiness at bay, but once they were in bed, asleep, and she was by herself, alone in the dark, sitting on the couch by the picture window, staring down the street at all those other houses just like her own, that desolate place inside her seemed to go on forever.

  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. Somewhere 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 tryi
ng 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 towards 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 fiddlecase 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 of 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 was 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 the 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 at the top 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.”

  They giggle, leaning into each other, tottering back and forth on their perch, crow girls, can’t be touched, can’t hardly be seen, except someone’s standing down there on the sidewalk, looking up through the falling snow, his worried expression so comical it sets them off on a new round of giggles.

  “Careful now!” he calls up to them. He thinks they’re on drugs—they can tell. “You don’t want to—”

  Before he can finish, they hold hands and let themselves fall backwards, off the fence.

  “Oh, Christ!”

  He jumps, gets a handhold on the top of the fence and hauls himself up. But when he looks over, over and down, way down, there’s nothing to be seen. No girls lying at the bottom of that big hole in the ground, nothing at all. Only the falling snow. It’s like they were never there.

  His arms start to ache and he lowers himself back down the fence, lets go, bending his knees slightly to absorb the impact of the last couple of feet. He slips, catches his balance. It seems very
still for a moment, so still he can hear an odd rhythmical whispering sound. Like wings. He looks up, but there’s too much snow coming down to see anything. A cab comes by, skidding on the slick street, and he blinks. The street’s full of city sounds again, muffled, but present. He hears the murmuring conversation of a couple approaching him, their shoulders and hair white with snow. A snowplow a few streets over. A distant siren.

  He continues along his way, but he’s walking slowly now, trudging through the drifts, not thinking so much of two girls sitting on top of a fence as remembering how, when he was a boy, he used to dream that he could fly.

  * * *

  After fiddling a little more with her sketch, Jilly finally put her charcoal down. She made herself a cup of herbal tea with the leftover hot water in the kettle and joined Geordie where he was sitting on the sofa, watching the snow come down. It was warm in the loft, almost cozy compared to the storm on the other side of the windowpanes, or maybe because of the storm. Jilly leaned back on the sofa, enjoying the companionable silence for a while before she finally spoke.

  “How do you feel after seeing the crow girls?” she asked.

  Geordie turned to look at her. “What do you mean, how do I feel?”

  “You know, good, bad…different….”

  Geordie smiled. “Don’t you mean ‘indifferent’?”

  “Maybe.” She picked up her tea from the crate where she’d set it and took a sip. “Well?” she asked when he didn’t continue.

  “Okay. How do I feel? Good, I suppose. They’re fun, they make me smile. In fact, just thinking of them now makes me feel good.”

  Jilly nodded thoughtfully as he spoke. “Me, too. And something else as well.”

  “The different,” Geordie began. He didn’t quite sigh. “You believe those stories of Jack’s, don’t you?”

  “Of course. And you don’t?”

  “I’m not sure,” he replied, surprising her.

  “Well, I think these crow girls were in the Cyberbean for a purpose,” Jilly said. “Like in that rhyme about crows.”