The Very Best of Charles De Lint

  Purple combat boots scuffing on the pavement, Katja felt adrift on the empty street. It seemed like only moments ago she’d been secure in the middle of good conversation, laughter and espressos; then someone remarked on the time, the café was closing and suddenly she was out here, on the street, by herself, finding her own way home. She held her jean jacket closed at her throat—the buttons had come off, one by one, and she kept forgetting to replace them—and listened to the swish of her long flowered skirt, the sound of her boots on the pavement. Listened as well for other footsteps and prayed for a cab to come by.

  She was paying so much attention to what might be lurking behind the shadowed mouths of the alleyways that she almost didn’t notice the slight figure curled up in the doorway of the pawn shop on her right. The sight made her pause. She glanced up and down the street before crouching down in the doorway. The figure’s features were in shadow, the small body outlined under what looked like a dirty white sheet, or a shawl. By its shape Katja could tell it wasn’t a boy.

  “Hey, are you okay?” she asked.

  When there was no response, she touched the girl’s shoulder and repeated her question. Large pale eyes flickered open, their gaze settling on Katja. The girl woke like a cat, immediately aware of everything around her. Her black hair hung about her face in a tangle. Unlike most street people, she had a sweet smell, like a field of clover, or a potpourri of dried rosehips and herbs, gathered in a glass bowl.

  “What makes you think I’m not okay?” the girl asked.

  Katja pushed the fall of her own dark hair back from her brow and settled back on her heels.

  “Well, for one thing,” she said, “you’re lying here in a doorway, on a bed of what looks like old newspapers. It’s not exactly the kind of place people pick to sleep in if they’ve got a choice.”

  She glanced up and down the street again as she spoke, still wary of her surroundings and their possible danger, still hoping to see a cab.

  “I’m okay,” the girl told her.

  “Yeah, right.”

  “No, really.”

  Katja had to smile. She wasn’t so old that she’d forgotten what it felt like to be in her late teens and immortal. Remembering, looking at this slight girl with her dark hair and strangely pale eyes, she got this odd urge to take in a stray the way that Angel and Jilly often did. She wasn’t sure why. She liked to think that she had as much sympathy as the next person, but normally it was hard to muster much of it at this time of night. Normally she was thinking too much about what terrors the night might hold for her to consider playing the Good Samaritan. But this girl looked so young….

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “Teresa. Teresa Lewis.”

  Katja offered her hand as she introduced herself.

  Teresa laughed. “Welcome to my home,” she said and shook Katja’s hand.

  “This a regular squat?” Katja asked. Nervous as she was at being out so late, she couldn’t imagine actually sleeping in a place like this on a regular basis.

  “No,” Teresa said. “I meant the street.”

  Katja sighed. Immortal. “Look. I don’t have that big a place, but there’s room on my couch if you want to crash.”

  Teresa gave her a considering look.

  “Well, I know it’s not the Harbour Ritz,” Katja began.

  “It’s not that,” Teresa told her. “It’s just that you don’t know me at all. I could be loco, for all you know. Get to your place and rob you….”

  “I’ve got a big family,” Katja told her. “They’d track you down and take it out of your skin.”

  Teresa laughed again. It was like they were meeting at a party somewhere, Katja thought, drinks in hand, no worries, instead of on Gracie Street at three A.M.

  “I’m serious,” she said. “I’ve got the room.”

  Teresa’s laughter trailed off. Her pale gaze settled on Katja’s features.

  “Do you believe in magic?” she asked.

  “Say what?”

  “Magic. Do you believe in it?”

  Katja blinked. She waited for the punch line, but when it didn’t come, she said, “Well, I’m not sure. My friend Jilly sure does—though maybe magic’s not quite the right word. It’s more like she believes there’s more to this world than we can always see or understand. She sees things….”

  Katja caught herself. How did we get into this? she thought. She wanted to change the subject, she wanted to get off the street before some homeboys showed up with all the wrong ideas in mind, but the steady weight of Teresa’s intense gaze wouldn’t let her go.

  “Anyway,” Katja said, “I guess you could say Jilly does. Believes in magic, I mean. Sees things.”

  “But what about you? Have you seen things?”

  Katja shook her head. “Only ‘old, unhappy, far-off things, and battles long ago,’” she said. “Wordsworth,” she added, placing the quote when Teresa raised her eyebrows in a question.

  “Then I guess you couldn’t understand,” Teresa told her. “See, the reason I’m out here like this is that I’m looking for a word.”

  3

  I can’t sleep. I lie in bed for what feels like hours, staring up at the shadows cast on the ceiling from the streetlight outside my bedroom window. Finally I get up. I pull on a pair of leggings and a T-shirt and pad quietly across the room in my bare feet. I stand in the doorway and look at my guest. She’s still sleeping, all curled up again, except her nest is made up of a spare set of my sheets and blankets now instead of old newspapers.

  I wish it wasn’t so early. I wish I could pick up the phone and talk to Jilly. I want to know if the strays she brings home tell stories as strange as mine told me on the way back to my apartment. I want to know if her strays can recognize the egret which is a deposed king. If they can understand the gossip of bees and what crows talk about when they gather in a murder. If they ever don the old woman wisdom to be found in the rattle-and-cough cry of a lonesome gull and wear it like a cloak of story.

  I want to know if Jilly’s ever heard of bird-brides, because Teresa says that’s what she is, what she usually is, until the birds fly away. To gather them back into her head takes a kind of a wedding ritual that’s sealed with a dream-word. That’s what she was doing out on Gracie Street when I found her: worn out from trying to get strangers to tell her a word that they’d only ever heard before in one of their dreams.

  I don’t have to tell you how helpful the people she met were. The ones that didn’t ignore her or call her names, just gave her spare change instead of the word she needs. But I can’t say as I blame them. If she’d come up to me with her spiel I don’t know how I’d have reacted. Not well, probably. Wouldn’t have listened. Gets so you can’t walk down a block some days without getting hit up for change, five or six times. I don’t want to be cold; but when it comes down to it, I’ve only got so much myself.

  I look away from my guest, my gaze resting on the phone for a moment, before I turn around and go back into my room. I don’t bother undressing. I just lie there on my bed, looking up at the shadow play that’s still being staged on my ceiling. I know what’s keeping me awake: I can’t decide if I’ve brought home some poor confused kid, or a piece of magic. It’s not the one or the other that’s brought on my insomnia. It’s that I’m seriously considering the fact that it might be one or the other.

  4

  “No, I have a place to live,” Teresa said the next morning. They were sitting at the narrow table in Katja’s kitchen that only barely seated the two of them comfortably, hands warming around mugs of freshly-brewed coffee. “I live in a bachelor in an old house on Stanton Street.”

  Katja shook her head. “Then why were you sleeping in a doorway last night?”

  “I don’t know. I think because the people on Gracie Street in the evening seem to dream harder than people anywhere else.”

  “They’re just more desperate to have a good time,” Katja said.

  “I suppose. Anyway, I was su
re I’d find my word there and by the time I realized I wouldn’t—at least last night—it was so late and I was just too tired to go home.”

  “But weren’t you scared?”

  Teresa regarded her with genuine surprise. “Of what?”

  How to explain, Katja wondered. Obviously this girl sitting across from her in a borrowed T-shirt, with sleep still gathered in the corners of her eyes, was fearless, like Jilly. Where did you start enumerating the dangers for them? And why bother? Teresa probably wouldn’t listen any more than Jilly ever did. Katja thought sometimes that people like them must have guardian angels watching out for them—and working overtime.

  “I feel like I’m always scared,” she said.

  Teresa nodded. “I guess that’s the way I feel, when the birds leave and all I have left in my head are empty nests and a few stray feathers. Kind of lonely, and scared that they’ll never come back.”

  That wasn’t the way Katja felt at all. Her fear lay in the headlines of newspapers and the sound bites that helped fill newscasts. There was too much evil running loose—random, petty evil, it was true, but evil all the same. Ever present and all around her so that you didn’t know who to trust anymore. Sometimes it seemed as though everyone in the world was so much bigger and more capable than her. Too often, confronted with their confidence, she could only feel helpless.

  “Where did you hear about this…this thing with the birds?” she said instead. “The way you can bring them back?”

  Teresa shrugged. “I just always knew it.”

  “But you have all these details….”

  Borrowed from bridal folklore, Katja added to herself—all except for the word she had to get from somebody else’s dream. The question she’d really wanted to ask was why those particular details? What made their borrowed possibilities true? Katja didn’t want to sound judgemental. The truth, she had to admit if she was honest with herself, wasn’t so much that she believed her houseguest as that she didn’t disbelieve her. Hadn’t she woken up this morning searching the fading remnants of her dreams, looking for a new word that only existed beyond the gates of her sleeping mind?

  Teresa was smiling at her. The wattage behind the expression seemed to light the room, banishing shadows and uncertainties, and Katja basked in its glow.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Teresa said. “They don’t even sound all that original except for the missing word, do they? But I believe any of us can make things happen—even magical, impossible things. It’s a matter of having faith in the private rituals we make up for ourselves.”

  “Rituals you make up…?”

  “Uh-huh. The rituals themselves aren’t all that important on their own—though once you’ve decided on them, you have to stick to them, just like the old alchemists did. You have to follow them through.”

  “But if the rituals aren’t that important,” Katja asked, “then what’s the point of them?”

  “How they help you focus your will—your intent. That’s what magic is, you know. It’s having a strong enough sense of self and what’s around you to not only envision it being different but making it different.”

  “You really believe this, don’t you?”

  “Of course,” Teresa said. “Don’t you?”

  “I don’t know. You make it sound so logical.”

  “That’s because it’s true. Or maybe—” That smile of Teresa’s returned, warming the room again, “—because I’m willing it to be true.”

  “So would your ritual work for me?”

  “If you believe in it. But you should probably find your own—a set of circumstances that feels right for you.” She paused for a moment, then added, “And you have to know what you’re asking for. My birds are what got me through a lot of bad times. Listening to their conversations and soliloquies let me forget what was happening to me.”

  Katja leaned forward. She could see the rush of memories rising in Teresa, could see the pain they brought with them. She wanted to reach out and hold her in a comforting embrace—the same kind of embrace she’d needed so often but rarely got.

  “What happened?” she asked, her voice soft.

  “I don’t want to remember,” Teresa said. She gave Katja an apologetic look. “It’s not that I can’t, it’s that I don’t want to.”

  “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to,” Katja assured her. “Just because I’m putting you up, doesn’t mean you have to explain yourself to me.”

  There was no sunshine in the smile that touched Teresa’s features now. It was more like moonlight playing on wild rose bushes, the cool light glinting on thorns. Memories could impale you just like thorns. Katja knew that all too well.

  “But I can’t not remember,” Teresa said. “That’s what so sad. For all the good things in my life, I can’t stop thinking of how much I hurt before the birds came.”

  5

  I know about pain. I know about loneliness. Talking with Teresa, I realize that these are the first real conversations I’ve had with someone else in years.

  I don’t want to make it sound as though I don’t have any friends, that I ever talk to anyone—but sometimes it feels like that all the same. I always seem to be standing on the outside of a friendship, of conversations, never really engaged. Even last night, before I found Teresa sleeping in the doorway. I was out with a bunch of people. I was in the middle of any number of conversations and camaraderie. But I still went home alone. I listened to what was going on around me. I smiled some, laughed some, added a sentence here, another there, but it wasn’t really me that was partaking of the company. The real me was one step removed, watching it happen. Like it seems I always am. Everybody I know seems to inhabit one landscape that they all share while I’m the only person standing in the landscape that’s inside of me.

  But today it’s different. We’re talking about weird, unlikely things, but I’m there with Teresa. I don’t even know her, there’s all sorts of people I’ve known for years, known way better, but not one of them seems to have looked inside me as truly as she does. This alchemy, this magic, she’s offering me, is opening a door inside me. It’s making me remember. It’s making me want to fill my head with birds so that I can forget.

  That’s the saddest thing, isn’t it? Wanting to forget. Desiring amnesia. I think that’s the only reason some people kill themselves. I know it’s the only reason I’ve ever seriously considered suicide.

  Consider the statistics: One out of every five women will be sexually traumatized by the time they reach their twenties. They might be raped, they might be a child preyed upon by a stranger, they might be abused by the very people who are supposed to be looking out for them.

  But the thing that statistic doesn’t tell you is how often it can happen to that one woman out of five. How it can happen to her over and over and over again, but on the statistical sheet, she’s still only listed as one woman in five. That makes it sound so random, the event one extraordinary moment of evil when set against the rest of her life, rather than something that she might have faced every day of her childhood.

  I’d give anything for a head full of birds. I’d give anything for the noise and clamor of their conversation to drown out the memories when they rise up inside of me.

  6

  Long after noon came and went, the two women still sat across from each other at the kitchen table. If their conversation could have been seen as well as heard, the spill of words that passed between them would have flooded off the table to eddy around their ankles in ever-deepening pools. It would have made for profound, dark water that was only bearable because each of them came to understand that the other truly understood what they had gone through, and sharing the stories of their battered childhoods made the burden, if not easier to bear, at least remind them that they weren’t alone in what they had undergone.

  The coffee had gone cold in their mugs, but the hands across the table they held to comfort each other were warm, palm to palm. When they finally ran out
of words, that contact helped maintain the bond of empathy that had

  grown up between them.

  “I didn’t have birds,” Katja said after a long silence. “All I had was poetry.”

  “You wrote poems?”

  Katja shook her head. “I became poetry. I inhabited poems. I filled them until their words were all I could hear inside my head.” She tilted her head back and quoted one:

  Rough wind, that moanest loud

  Grief too sad for song;

  Wild wind, when sullen cloud

  Knells all the night long;

  Sad storm, whose tears are vain,

  Bare woods, whose branches strain,

  Deep caves and dreary main,—

  Wail, for the world’s wrong!

  “That’s so sad. What’s it called?” Teresa asked.

  “‘A dirge.’ It’s by Shelley. I always seemed to choose the sad poems, but I only ever wanted them for how I’d get so full of words I wouldn’t be able to remember anything else.”

  “Birds and words,” Teresa said. Her smile came out again from behind the dark clouds of her memories. “We rhyme.”

  7

  We wash Teresa’s dress that afternoon. It wasn’t very white anymore—not after her having grubbed about in it on Gracie Street all day and then worn it as a nightgown while she slept in a doorway—but it cleans up better than I think it will. I feel like we’re in a detergent commercial when we take it out of the dryer. The dress seems to glow against my skin as I hand it over to her.

  Her something old is a plastic Crackerjack ring that she’s had since she was a kid. Her something new are her sneakers—a little scuffed and worse for the wear this afternoon, but still passably white. Her borrowed is a white leather clasp-purse that her landlady loaned her. Her blue is a small clutch of silk flowers: forget-me-nots tied up with a white ribbon that she plans to wear as a corsage.