Geordie got it right away. “Two for mirth.”
Jilly nodded. “Heather needed some serious cheering up. Maybe even something more. You know how when you start feeling low, you can get on this descending spiral of depression…everything goes wrong, things get worse, because you expect them to?”
“Fight it with the power of positive thinking, I always say.”
“Easier said than done when you’re feeling that low. What you really need at a time like that is something completely unexpected to kick you out of it and remind you that there’s more to life than the hopeless, grey expanse you think is stretching in every direction. What Colin Wilson calls absurd good news.”
“You’ve been talking to my brother.”
“It doesn’t matter where I got it from—it’s still true.”
Geordie shook his head. “I don’t buy the idea that Maida and Zia showed up just to put your friend in a better mood. Even bird people can get a craving for a cup of coffee, can’t they?”
“Well, yes,” Jilly said. “But that doesn’t preclude their being there for Heather as well. Sometimes when a person needs something badly enough, it just comes to them. A personal kind of steam engine time. You might not be able to articulate what it is you need, you might not even know you need something—at least, not at a conscious level—but the need’s still there, calling out to whatever’s willing to listen.”
Geordie smiled. “Like animal spirits.”
“Crow girls.”
Geordie shook his head. “Drink your tea and go to bed,” he told her. “I think you need a good night’s sleep.”
“But—”
“It was only a coincidence. Things don’t always have a meaning. Sometimes they just happen. And besides, how do you even know they had any effect on Heather?”
“I could just tell. And don’t change the subject.”
“I’m not.”
“Okay,” Jilly said. “But don’t you see? It doesn’t matter if it was a coincidence or not. They still showed up when Heather needed them. It’s more of that ‘small world, spooky world’ stuff Professor Dapple goes on about. Everything’s connected. It doesn’t matter if we can’t see how, it’s still all connected. You know, chaos theory and all that.”
Geordie shook his head, but he was smiling. “Does it ever strike you as weird when something Bramley’s talked up for years suddenly becomes an acceptable element of scientific study?”
“Nothing strikes me as truly weird,” Jilly told him. “There’s only stuff I haven’t figured out yet.”
* * *
Heather barely slept that night. For the longest time she simply couldn’t sleep, and then when she finally did, she was awake by dawn. Wide awake, but heavy with an exhaustion that came more from heartache than lack of sleep.
Sitting up against the headboard, she tried to resist the sudden tightness in her chest, but that sad, cold wasteland swelled inside her. The bed seemed depressingly huge. She didn’t so much miss Peter’s presence as feel adrift in the bed’s expanse of blankets and sheets. Adrift in her life. Why was it he seemed to have no trouble carrying on when the simple act of getting up in the morning felt as though it would require far more energy than she could ever hope to muster?
She stared at the snow swirling against her window, not at all relishing the drive into town on a morning like this. If anything, it was coming down harder than it had been last night. All it took was the suggestion of snow and everybody in the city seemed to forget how to drive, never mind common courtesy or traffic laws. A blizzard like this would snarl traffic and back it up as far as the mountains.
She sighed, supposing it was just as well she’d woken so early since it would take her at least an extra hour to get downtown today.
Up, she told herself, and forced herself to swing her feet to the floor and rise. A shower helped. It didn’t really ease the heartache, but the hiss of the water made it easier to ignore her thoughts. Coffee, when she was dressed and had brewed a pot, helped more, though she still winced when Janice came bounding into the kitchen.
“It’s a snow day!” she cried. “No school. They just announced it on the radio. The school’s closed, closed, closed!”
She danced about in her flannel nightie, pirouetting in the small space between the counter and the table.
“Just yours,” Heather asked, “or Casey’s, too?”
“Mine, too,” Casey replied, following her sister into the room.
Unlike Janice, she was maintaining her cool, but Heather could tell she was just as excited. Too old to allow herself to take part in Janice’s spontaneous celebration, but young enough to be feeling giddy with the unexpected holiday.
“Good,” Heather said. “You can look after your sister.”
“Mom!” Janice protested. “I’m not a baby.”
“I know. It’s just good to have someone older in the house when—”
“You can’t be thinking of going in to work today,” Casey said.
“We could do all kinds of stuff,” Janice added. “Finish decorating the house. Baking.”
“Yeah,” Casey said, “all the things we don’t seem to have time for anymore.”
Heather sighed. “The trouble is,” she explained, “the real world doesn’t work like school. We don’t get snow days.”
Casey shook her head. “That is so unfair.”
The phone rang before Heather could agree.
“I’ll bet it’s your boss,” Janice said as Heather picked up the phone. “Calling to tell you it’s a snow day for you, too.”
Don’t I wish, Heather thought. But then what would she do at home all day? It was so hard being here, even with the girls and much as she loved them. Everywhere she turned, something reminded her of how the promises of a good life had turned into so much ash. At least work kept her from brooding. She brought the receiver up to her ear and spoke into the mouthpiece.
“Hello?”
“I’ve been thinking,” the voice on the other end of the line said. “About last night.”
Heather had to smile. Wasn’t that so Jilly, calling up first thing in the morning as though they were still in the middle of last night’s conversation.
“What about last night?” she said.
“Well, all sorts of stuff. Like remembering a perfect moment in the past and letting it carry you through a hard time now.”
If only, Heather thought. “I don’t have a moment that perfect,” she said.
“I sort of got that feeling,” Jilly told her. “That’s why I think they were a message—a kind of perfect moment now that you can use the same way.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The crow girls. In the café last night.”
“The crow…” It took her a moment to realize what Jilly meant. Their complexions had been dark enough so she supposed they could have been Indians.
“How do you know what tribe they belonged to?”
“Not crow, Native American,” Jilly said, “but crow, bird people.”
Heather shook her head as she listened to what Jilly went on to say, for all that only her daughters were here to see the movement. Glum looks had replaced their earlier excitement when they realized the call wasn’t from her boss.
“Do you have any idea how improbable all of this sounds?” she asked when Jilly finished. “Life’s not like your paintings.”
“Says who?”
“How about common sense?”
“Tell me,” Jilly said. “Where did common sense ever get you?”
Heather sighed. “Things don’t happen just because we want them to,” she said.
“Sometimes that’s exactly why they happen,” Jilly replied. “They happen because we need them to.”
“I don’t live in that kind of a world.”
“But you could.”
Heather looked across the kitchen at her daughters once more. The girls were watching her, trying to make sense out of the one-sided conversation they were he
aring. Heather wished them luck. She was hearing both sides and that didn’t seem to help at all. You couldn’t simply reinvent your world because you wanted to. Things just were how they were.
“Just think about it,” Jilly added. “Will you do that much?”
“I…”
That bleak landscape inside Heather seemed to expand, growing so large there was no way she could contain it. She focused on the faces of her daughters. She remembered the crow girls in the café. There was so much innocence in them all, daughters and crow girls. She’d been just like them once and she knew it wasn’t simply nostalgia colouring her memory. She knew there’d been a time when she lived inside each particular day, on its own and by itself, instead of trying to deal with all the days of her life at once, futilely attempting to reconcile the discrepancies and mistakes.
“I’ll try,” she said into the phone.
They said their goodbyes and Heather slowly cradled the receiver.
“Who was that, Mom?” Casey asked.
Heather looked out the window. The snow was still falling, muffling the world. Covering its complexities with a blanket as innocent as the hope she saw in her daughters’ eyes.
“Jilly,” she said. She took a deep breath, then smiled at them. “She was calling to tell me that today really is a snow day.”
The happiness that flowered on their faces helped ease the tightness in her chest. The grey landscape waiting for her there didn’t go away, but for some reason, it felt less profound. She wasn’t even worried about what her boss would say when she called to tell him she wouldn’t be in today.
* * *
Crow girls can move like ghosts. They’ll slip into your house when you’re not home, sometimes when you’re only sleeping, go walking spirit-soft through your rooms and hallways, sit in your favourite chair, help themselves to cookies and beer, borrow a trinket or two which they’ll mean to return and usually do. It’s not break and enter so much as simple curiosity. They’re worse than cats.
Privacy isn’t in their nature. They don’t seek it and barely understand the concept. Personal property is even more alien. The idea of ownership—that one can lay proprietary claim to a piece of land, an object, another person or creature—doesn’t even register.
“Whatcha looking at?” Zia asks.
They don’t know whose house they’re in. Walking along on the street, trying to catch snowflakes on their tongues, one or the other of them suddenly got the urge to come inside. Upstairs, the family sleeps.
Maida shows her the photo album. “Look,” she says. “It’s the same people, but they keep changing. See, here’s she’s a baby, then she’s a little girl, then a teenager.”
“Everything changes,” Zia says. “Even we get old. Look at Crazy Crow.”
“But it happens so fast with them.”
Zia sits down beside her and they pore over the pictures, munching on apples they found earlier in a cold cellar in the basement.
Upstairs, a father wakes in his bed. He stares at the ceiling, wondering what woke him. Nervous energy crackles inside him like static electricity, a sudden spill of adrenaline, but he doesn’t know why. He gets up and checks the children’s rooms. They’re both asleep. He listens for intruders, but the house is silent.
Stepping back into the hall, he walks to the head of the stairs and looks down. He thinks he sees something in the gloom, two dark-haired girls sitting on the sofa, looking through a photo album. Their gazes lift to meet his and hold it. The next thing he knows, he’s on the sofa himself, holding the photo album in his hand. There are no strange girls sitting there with him. The house seems quieter than it’s ever been, as though the fridge, the furnace and every clock the family owns are holding their breath along with him.
He sets the album down on the coffee table, walks slowly back up the stairs and returns to his bed. He feels like a stranger, misplaced. He doesn’t know this room, doesn’t know the woman beside him. All he can think about is the first girl he ever loved and his heart swells with a bittersweet sorrow. An ache pushes against his ribs, makes it almost impossible to breathe.
What if, what if…
He turns on his side and looks at his wife. For one moment her face blurs, becomes a morphing image that encompasses both her features and those of his first true love. For one moment it seems as though anything is possible, that for all these years he could have been married to another woman, to that girl who first held, then unwittingly, broke his heart.
“No,” he says.
His wife stirs, her features her own again. She blinks sleepily at him.
“Wha…?” she mumbles.
He holds her close, heartbeat drumming, more in love with her for being who she is than he has ever been before.
Outside, the crow girls are lying on their backs, making snow angels on his lawn, scissoring their arms and legs, shaping skirts and wings. They break their apple cores in two and give their angels eyes, then run off down the street, holding hands. The snow drifts are undisturbed by their weight. It’s as though they, too, like the angels they’ve just made, have wings.
* * *
“This is so cool,” Casey tells her mother. “It really feels like Christmas. I mean, not like Christmases we’ve had, but, you know, like really being part of Christmas.”
Heather nods. She’s glad she brought the girls down to the soup kitchen to help Jilly and her friends serve a Christmas dinner to those less fortunate than themselves. She’s been worried about how her daughters would take the break from tradition, but then realized, with Peter gone, tradition is already broken. Better to begin all over again.
The girls had been dubious when she first broached the subject with them— “I don’t want to spend Christmas with losers,” had been Casey’s first comment. Heather hadn’t argued with her. All she’d said was, “I want you to think about what you just said.”
Casey’s response had been a sullen look—there were more and more of these lately—but Heather knew her own daughter well enough. Casey had stomped off to her room, but then come back half an hour later and helped her explain to Janice why it might not be the worst idea in the world.
She watches them now, Casey having rejoined her sister where they are playing with the homeless children, and knows a swell of pride. They’re such good kids, she thinks as she takes another sip of her cider. After a couple of hours serving coffee, tea and hot cider, she’d really needed to get off her feet for a moment.
“Got something for you,” Jilly says, sitting down on the bench beside her.
Heather accepts the small, brightly-wrapped parcel with reluctance. “I thought we said we weren’t doing Christmas presents.”
“It’s not really a Christmas present. It’s more an everyday sort of a present that I just happen to be giving you today.”
“Right.”
“So aren’t you going to open it?”
Heather peels back the paper and opens the small box. Inside, nestled in a piece of folded Kleenex, are two small silver earrings cast in the shapes of crows. Heather lifts her gaze.
“They’re beautiful.”
“Got them at the craft show from a local jeweler. Rory Crowther. See, his name’s on the card in the bottom of the box. They’re to remind you—”
Heather smiles. “Of crow girls?”
“Partly. But more to remember that this—” Jilly waves a hand that could be taking in the basement of St. Vincent’s, could be taking in the whole world. “It’s not all we get. There’s more. We can’t always see it, but it’s there.”
For a moment, Heather thinks she sees two dark-haired slim figures standing on the far side of the basement, but when she looks more closely they’re only a baglady and Geordie’s friend Tanya, talking.
For a moment, she thinks she hears the sound of wings, but it’s only the murmur of conversation. Probably.
What she knows for sure is that the grey landscape inside her chest is shrinking a little more, every day.
??
?Thank you,” she says.
She isn’t sure if she’s speaking to Jilly or to crow girls she’s only ever seen once, but whose presence keeps echoing through her life. Her new life. It isn’t necessarily a better one. Not yet. But at least it’s on the way up from wherever she’d been going, not down into a darker despair.
“Here,” Jilly says. “Let me help you put them on.”
Birds
Isn’t it wonderful? The world scans.
—Nancy Willard, from “Looking for Mr. Ames”
1
When her head is full of birds, anything is possible. She can understand the slow language of the trees, the song of running water, the whispering gossip of the wind. The conversation of the birds fills her until she doesn’t even think to remember what it was like before she could understand them. But sooner or later, the birds go away, one by one, find new nests, new places to fly. It’s not that they tire of her; it’s simply not in their nature to tarry for too long.
But she misses them. Misses their company, the flutter of wings inside her head and their trilling conversations. Misses the possibilities. The magic.
To call them back she has to approach them as a bride. Dressed in white, with something old and something new, something borrowed and something blue. And a word. A new word, from another’s dream. A word that has never been heard before.
2
Katja Faro was out later than she thought safe, at least for this part of town and at this time of night, the minute hand of her old-fashioned wristwatch steadily climbing up the last quarter of her watch face to count the hour. Three A.M. That late.
From early evening until the clubs close, Gracie Street is a jumbled clutter of people, looking for action, looking for gratification, or just out and about, hanging, gossiping with their friends. There’s always something happening, from Lee Street all the way across to Williamson, but tag on a few more hours and clubland becomes a frontier. The lights advertising the various cafés, clubs and bars begin to flicker and go out, their patrons and staff have all gone home, and the only people out on the streets are a few stragglers, such as Katja tonight, and the predators.