All she needs is that missing word.
I don’t have one for her, but I know someone who might. Jilly always likes to talk about things not quite of this world—things seen from the corner of the eye, or brought over from a dream. And whenever she talks about dreams, Sophie Etoile’s name comes up because Jilly insists Sophie’s part faerie and therefore a true dreamer. I don’t know Sophie all that well, certainly not well enough to guess at her genealogy, improbable or not as the case may be. But she does have an otherworldly, Pre-Raphaelite air about her that makes Jilly’s claims seem possible—at least they seem possible considering my present state of mind.
And there’s no one else I can turn to, no one I can think of. I can’t explain this desperation I feel towards Teresa, a kind of mothering/big sister complex. I just have to help her. And while I know that I may not be able to make myself forget, I think I can do it for her. Or at least I want to try.
So that’s how we find ourselves knocking at the door of Sophie’s studio later that afternoon. When Sophie answers the door, her curly brown hair tied back from her face and her painting smock as spotless as Jilly says it always is, I don’t have to go into a long explanation as to what we’re doing there or why we need this word. I just have to mention that Jilly’s told me that she’s a true dreamer and Sophie gets this smile on her face, like you do when you’re thinking about a mischievous child who’s too endearing to get angry at, and she thinks for a moment, then says a word that at least I’ve never heard before. I turn to Teresa to ask her if it’s what she needs, but she’s already got this beatific look on her face.
“Mmm,” is all she can manage.
I thank Sophie, who’s giving the pair of us a kind of puzzled smile and lead Teresa back down the narrow stairs of Sophie’s building and out onto the street. I wonder what I’m going to do with Teresa. She looks for all the world as though she’s tripping. But just when I decide to take her home again, her eyes get a little more focused and she takes my hand.
“I have to…readjust to all of this,” she says. “But I don’t want to have us just walk out of each other’s lives. Can I come and visit you tomorrow?”
“Sure,” I tell her. I hesitate a moment, then have to ask, “Can you really hear them?”
“Listen,” she says.
She draws my head close to hers until my ear is resting right up against her temple. I swear I hear a bird’s chorus resonating inside her head, conducted through skin and bone, from her mind into my mind.
“I’ll come by in the morning,” she says, and then drifts off down the pavement.
All I can do is watch her go, that birdsong still echoing inside me.
8
Back in my own living room, I sit on the carpet. I can feel a foreign vibe in my apartment, a quivering in the air from Teresa having been there. Everything in the room carries the memory of her, the knowledge of her gaze, how she handled and examined them with her attention. My furniture, the posters and prints on my walls, my knickknacks, all seemed subtly changed, a little stiff from the awareness of her looking at them.
It takes a while for the room to settle down into its familiar habits. The fridge muttering to itself in the kitchen. The pictures in their frames letting out their stomachs and hanging slightly askew once more.
I take down a box of family photos from the hall closet and fan them out on the carpet in front of me. I look at the happy family they depict and try to see hints of the darkness that doesn’t appear in the photos. There are too many smiles—mine, my mother’s, my father’s. I know real life was never the way these pictures pretend it was.
I sit there remembering my father’s face—the last time I saw him. We were in the courtroom, waiting for him to be sentenced. He wouldn’t look at me. My mother wouldn’t look at me. I sat at the table with only a lawyer for support, only a stranger for family. That memory always makes me feel ashamed because even after all he’d done to me, I didn’t feel any triumph. I felt only disloyalty. I felt only that I was the one who’d been bad, that what had happened to me had been my fault. I knew back then it was wrong to feel that way—just as I know now that it is—but I can’t seem to help myself.
I squeeze my eyes shut, but the moment’s locked in my brain, just like all those other memories from my childhood that put a lie to the photographs fanned out on the carpet around me. Words aren’t going to blot them out for me today. There aren’t enough poems in the world to do that. And even if I could gather birds into my head, I don’t think they would work for me. But I remember what Teresa told me about rituals and magic.
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.
I remember the echoing sound of the birds I heard gossiping in her head and I know that I can find peace, too. I just have to believe that I can. I just have to know what it is that I want and concentrate on having it, instead of what I’ve got. I have to find the ritual that’ll make it work for me.
Instinctively, I realize it can’t be too easy. Like Teresa’s dream-word, the spell needs an element to complete it that requires some real effort on my part to attain it. But I know what the rest of the ritual will be—it comes into my head, full-blown, as if I’ve always known it but simply never stopped to access that knowledge before.
I pick up a picture of my father from the carpet and carefully tear his face into four pieces, sticking one piece in each of the front and back pockets of my jeans. I remember something I heard about salt, about it being used to cleanse, and add a handful of it to each pocket. I wrap the fingers of my left hand together with a black ribbon and tie the bow so that it lies across my knuckles. I lick my right forefinger and write my name on the bare skin of my stomach with saliva. Then I let my shirt fall back down to cover the invisible word and leave the apartment, looking for a person who, when asked to name a nineteenth-century poet, will mistakenly put together the given name of one with the surname of another.
From somewhere I hear a sound like Teresa’s birds, singing their approval.
Held Safe by Moonlight and Vines
1
Lillie’s in the graveyard again, looking for ghosts. She just can’t stay away.
“I’m paying my respects,” she says, but it doesn’t make sense.
These days All Souls Cemetery’s about as forgotten as the people buried in it. The land belongs to some big company now and they’re just waiting for the paperwork to go through at city hall. One day soon they’ll be moving what’s left of the bodies, tearing down all those old-fashioned mausoleums and crypts and putting up something shiny and new. Who’s going to miss it? Nobody goes there now except for the dealers with their little packets of oblivion and junkies looking for a fix.
The only people who care about the place are from the Crowsea Heritage Society. And Lillie. Everybody else just wants to see it go. Everybody else likes the idea of making a place gone wild safe again, never mind they don’t put it quite that way. But that’s what they’re thinking. You can see it in the back of their eyes when they talk about it.
See, there’s something that scares most people about the night, something that rises out of old memories, out of the genetic soup we all carry around inside us. Monsters in closets when we were kids and further back still, a long way, all the way back to the things waiting out there where the fire’s light can’t reach. It’s not something anybody talks about, but I know that’s what they see in All Souls because I can see it, too.
It’s got nothing to do with the drug deals going down. People know a piece of the night is biding in there, thinking about them, and they can’t wait to see it go. Even the dealers. You see them hanging around by the gates, money moves from one hand to the other, packets of folded paper follow suit, everything smooth, moves like magic, they’re fearless these guys. But they don’t go any farther in than they have to. Nobody does except for Lillie.
“There’s been nobody buried there in fifty years
,” I tell her, but that just gets her back up. “All the more reason to give those old souls some respect,” she says. But that’s not it. I know she’s looking for ghosts. Thing is, I don’t know why.
2
Alex’s problem is he wants an answer for everything. All he ever does is go around asking questions. Never lets a thing lie. Always has to know what’s going on and why. Can’t understand that some things don’t have reasons. Or that some people don’t feel like explaining themselves. They just do what feels right. Get an idea in their head and follow it through and don’t worry about what someone else is going to think or if anybody else understands.
In Alex’s world there’s only right and wrong, black and white. Me, I fall through the cracks of that world. In my head, it’s all grey. In my head, it’s all like walking in the twilight, a thousand shades of moonglow and dusky skies and shadow.
He thinks of me sitting here in the dark, all those old stone mausoleums standing around me, old and battered like the tenements leaning against each other on the streets where we grew up, and it spooks him. But All Souls comforts me, I don’t know why. Half the trees inside are dead, the rest are dying. Most of the grass is yellow and brown and the only flowers in this place these days grow on weeds, except in one corner where a scraggly old rosebush keeps on trying, tough old bugger doesn’t know enough to give up. The stone walls are crumbling down, the cast-iron gates haven’t worked in years. There’s a bunch of losers crowded around those gates, cutting deals, more nervous of what’s here, inside, than of the man showing up and busting them. I come in over the wall and go deep, where the shadows hide me, and they never even know I’m here. Nobody does, except for Alex and he just doesn’t understand.
I know what Alex sees when he looks at this place. I see it, too, at first, each time I come. But after a while, when I’m over the wall and inside, walking the narrow lanes in between the stones and tombs, uneven cobbles underfoot, the shadows lying thick everywhere I look, it gets different. I go someplace else. I don’t hear the dealers, I don’t see the junkies. The cemetery’s gone, the city’s gone, and me, I’m gone, too.
The only thing still with me are the walls, but they’re different in that other place. Not so worn down. The stones have been fit together without mortar, each one cunningly placed against the other and solid. Those walls go up ten feet and you’d have to ram them with a bulldozer before they’d come down.
Inside, it’s a garden. Sort of. A wild place. A tangle of bushes and briars, trees I’ve got no name for and vines hanging everywhere. A riot of flowers haunt the ground cover, pale blossoms that catch the moonlight and hold it in their petals.
The moonlight. That moon is so big in this place it feels like it could swallow the world. When I stand there in the wild garden and look up at it, I feel small, like I’m no bigger than the space of time between one moment and the next, but not the same way I feel small anywhere else. Where I come from there are millions of people living everywhere and each one of them’s got their own world. It’s so easy to lose a part of yourself in those worlds, to just find yourself getting sucked away until there’s next to nothing left of who you are. But I don’t have to be careful about that here. There aren’t any of those millions of people here and that moon, it doesn’t swallow up who I am; its golden light fills me up, reveling in what it knows me to be. I’m small in its light, sure, but the kind of small that can hold everything there is to be held. The moon’s just bigger, that’s all. Not more important than me, just different.
Those junkies don’t know what they’re missing, never getting any farther inside the gates than the first guy in a jean vest with the right price.
3
Trouble is, Lillie doesn’t understand danger. She’s never had to go through the hard times some of us did, never really seen what people can do to each other when they’re feeling desperate or just plain mean. She grew up poor, like everybody else in our neighbourhood, but her family loved her and she didn’t get knocked around the way those of us who didn’t have her kind of parents did. She was safe at home; out on the streets, I always looked after her, made sure the hard cases left her alone.
I’m working as a bouncer at Chic Cheeks the night I hear she’s been going to All Souls, so I head down there after my shift to check things out. It’s a good thing I do. Some of the guys hanging around by the gates have gotten bored and happened to spot her, all alone in there and looking so pretty. Guess they decided they were going to have themselves a little fun. Bad move. But then they didn’t expect me to come along.
I remember a teacher I had in junior high telling me one time how wood and stone make poor conductors. Well, they conduct pain pretty good, as those boys find out. I introduce one of them face-first to a tombstone and kind of make a mess of his nose, knock out a couple of teeth. His pals aren’t chickenshit, I’ll give them that much. I hear the snickt of their blades snapping open, so I drop the first guy. He makes some kind of gurgling noise when he hits the ground and rolls onto my boot. I push him away and then ignore him. He’s too busy feeling his pain to cause me any immediate grief. I turn to his buddies, a little pissed off now, but we don’t get into it.
“Oh Christ,” one of them says, recognizing me.
“We didn’t mean nothing, Al,” the other one says.
They’re putting their knives away, backing up.
“We knew she was one of your people, we never would’ve touched her. I swear it, man.”
Guess I’ve got a bit of a rep. Nothing serious. I’m not some big shot. What it’s got to do with is my old man.
Crazy Eddie is what they used to call him on the streets. Started running numbers for the bosses back when he was a kid, then moved into collections, which is where he got his name. You don’t want to think it of your own flesh and blood, but the old man was a psycho. He’d do any crazed thing came to mind if you couldn’t pay up. You’re in for a few yards, you better cough it up, don’t matter what you’ve got to do to get the money, because he’d as soon as cut your throat as collect the bread.
After a while the bosses started using him for hits, the kind where they’re making a statement. Messy, crazy hits. He did that for years until he got into a situation he couldn’t cut his way out of. Cops took him away in a bunch of little bags.
Man, I’ll never forget that day. I was doing a short stretch in the county when I found out and I near laughed myself sick. I’d hated that old bastard for the way he’d treated Ma, for what he did to my sister Juney. He used to kick the shit out of me on a regular basis, but I could deal with that. It was the things he did to them…. I knew one day I’d take him down, didn’t matter he was my old man. I just hadn’t got around to it yet. Hadn’t figured out a way to let the bosses know it was personal, not some kind of criticism of their business.
Anyway, I’m not mean like the old man was, I’ll tell you that straight-off, but I purely don’t take crap from anybody. I don’t have to get into it too much anymore. People take a look at me now and think, blood is blood. They see my old man’s crazy eyes when they look in mine, and they find some other place to be than where I’m standing.
So I make the point with these boys that they don’t want to mess with Lillie, and all it takes is a tap against a tombstone for them to get the message. I let them get their pal and take off, then I go to see what Lillie’s doing.
It’s the strangest thing. She’s just standing there by one of those old stone mausoleums, swaying back and forth, looking off into the space between a couple of those stone crypts. I scratch my head, and take a closer look myself. She’s mesmerized by something, but damned if I know what. I can hear her humming to herself, still doing that swaying thing, mostly with her upper body, back and forth, smiling that pretty smile of hers, short black hair standing up at attention the way it always does. I’m forever trying to talk her into growing it long, but she laughs at me whenever I do.
I guess I watch her for about an hour that night. I remember thinking she’d
been sampling some of the dealers’ wares until she suddenly snaps out of it. I fade back into the shadows at that point. Don’t want her to think I’ve been spying on her. I’m just looking out for her, but she doesn’t see it that way. She gets seriously pissed at me and I hate having Lillie mad at me.
She walks right by me, still humming to herself. I can see she’s not stoned, just Lillie-strange. I watch her climb up some vines where one of the walls is broken and low, and then she’s gone. I go out the front way, just to remind the boys what’s what, and catch up with Lillie a few blocks away, casual-like. Don’t ask her where she’s been. Just say how-do, make sure she’s okay without letting on I’m worried, and head back to my own place.
I don’t know exactly when it is I realize she’s looking for ghosts in there. It just comes to me one day, slips in sideways when I’m thinking about something else. I try talking to her about it from time to time but all she does is smile, the way only she can.
“You wouldn’t understand,” she says.
“Try me.”
She shakes her head. “It’s not something to understand,” she says. “It’s just something you do. The less you worry at it, the more it makes sense.”
She’s right. I don’t understand.
4
There’s a boy living in the garden. He reminds me a little of Alex. It’s not that they look the same. This kid’s all skin and bones, held together with wiry muscles. Naked and scruffy, crazy tangled hair full of burrs and twigs and stuff, peach-fuzz vying with a few actual beard hairs, dink hanging loose when he’s not holding on to it—I guess you’ve got to do something with your hands when you don’t have pockets. Alex, he’s like a fridge with arms and legs. Big, strong, and loyal as all get-out. Not school-smart, but bright. You couldn’t pick a couple of guys that looked less alike.