“Look,” she said. “You read what I went through as a kid. I’m no better or stronger or braver than you are. But I am determined to leave things a little better than they were before I got here. That’s what gets me through. And I have to admit there’s a certain selfishness involved. You see, I want to live in that better world. I know it’s not going to happen unless we all clean up our act and I know I can’t make anybody else do that. But I’ll be damned if I don’t do it myself. You know, like a Kickaha friend of mine says, live large and walk in Beauty.”
“You are very … persuasive.”
Jilly grinned. “It’s just this gift I have.”
She stood up and offered him a hand.
“So what do you say, buffalo man? You want to give this life another shot?”
He allowed her to help him up to his feet.
“There’s a problem,” he said.
“No, no, no. Ignore the negatives, if only for now.”
“You don’t understand. The door that brought us here—it only opens one way.”
“What door?”
“My old life was finished and I was on my way to the new. All of this—” He made a motion with his hand to encompass everything around them. “Is only a memory.”
“Whose memory?” Jilly asked, getting a bad feeling.
“Mine. The memory of a dying man.”
She smiled brightly. “So live. I thought we’d already been through this earlier.”
“I would. You’ve convinced me enough of that. Only there’s no way back.”
“There’s always a way back … isn’t there?”
He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to.
“Oh, great. I get to be in a magical adventure only it turns out to be like a train on a one-way track and we left the happy ending station miles back.”
“I’m sorry.”
She took his hand and gave it a squeeze. “Me, too.”
6
“Nothing’s happening,” Maida said.
Zia peered at the two still bodies on the sofa. She gave Jilly a gentle poke with her finger.
“She’s still veryvery far away,” she agreed.
Cerin sighed and let his fingers fall from the strings of the rose-harp. The music echoed on for a few moments, then all was still.
“I tried to put all the things she loves into the calling-on,” he said. “Painting and friendship and crows and whimsy, but it’s not working. Wherever she’s gone, it’s further than I can reach.”
“How did it happen anyway?” the professor asked. “All she did was touch him. Meran did the same and she wasn’t taken away.”
“Jilly’s too open and trusting,” Meran said. “She didn’t think to guard herself from the man’s spirit. When we fall away into death, most of us will grab hold of anything we can to stay our fall. That’s what happened to her—he grabbed her and held on hard.”
“He’s dying?”
Meran glanced at the professor and nodded.
“I should never have brought him here,” Lucius said.
“You couldn’t have known.”
“It’s our fault,” Zia said.
Maida nodded glumly. “Oh, we’re the most miserably bad girls, we are.”
“Let’s worry about whose fault it was some other time,” Meran said. “Right now I want to concentrate on where he could have taken her.”
“I’ve never died,” Lucius said, “so I can’t say where a dying man would draw another’s soul, but I’ve withdrawn from the world …”
“And?” Meran prompted him.
“I went into my own mind. I lived in my memories. I didn’t remember. I lived in them.”
“So if we knew who he was,” Cerin said. “Then perhaps we could—”
“We don’t need to know who he is,” Meran broke in. “All we need to know is what he was thinking.”
“Would the proverbial life flashing before one’s eyes be relevant here?” the professor asked. “Because that could touch on anything.”
“We need something more specific,” Cerin said.
Meran nodded. “Such as … where the crow girls found him. Wouldn’t he be thinking of his surroundings at some point?”
“It’s still a one-way door,” Cerin pointed out.
“But if we can open it even a crack,” Lucius said.
Cerin smiled. “Then maybe we can pull them out before it closes on us again.”
“We can do that,” Maida said.
Zia nodded. “We’re very good at opening things.”
“Even better when there’s sweets inside.”
Zia rapped on the man’s head with a knuckle.
“Hello, hello in there,” she said. “Can you hear me?”
“Zia!” Lucius said.
“Well, how else am I supposed to get his attention?”
“Hold on,” Meran said. “Perhaps we’re going about this all wrong. Instead of concentrating on the door he is, we should be concentrating on the door Jilly is.”
“Oh, good idea,” Maida said.
The crow girls immediately turned their attention to Jilly. They leaned close, one on either side, and began whispering in her ears.
7
“So I guess this is sort of like a recording,” Jilly said, “except instead of being on pause, we’re in a tape loop.”
Which was why the traffic noise she heard was so repetitive. Being part of his memory, it, too, was in a loop.
“You have such an interesting way of looking at things,” the buffalo man said.
“No, humor me in this. We’re in a loop of your memory, right? Well, what’s to stop you from thinking of something else? Or concentrating and getting us past the loop.”
“To what purpose?”
“To whatever comes next.”
“We know what comes next,” he said.
“No. You assume we do. The last thing you seem to remember is lying here in this alleyway. You must have passed out at that point, which is the loop we’re in. Except, I showed up and you’re conscious and we’ve been talking—none of this is memory. We’re already somewhere else than your memory. So what’s to stop you from taking us further?”
“I have no memory beyond the point where I closed my eyes.”
But Jilly was on a roll.
“Of course not,” she said. “So we’ll have to use our imaginations.”
“And imagine what?”
“Well, crows would be good for starters. The crow girls would have been flying above, and then they noticed you and …” She paused, cocking her head. “Listen. Can you hear that?”
At first he shook his head, but then his gaze lifted and the strip of sky above the alley went dark with crows. A cloud of them blocked the sun, circling just above the rooftops and filling the air with their raucous cries.
“Wow,” Jilly said. “You’ve got a great imagination.”
“This isn’t my doing,” he said.
They watched as two of the birds left the flock and came spiraling down on their black wings. Just before they reached the pavement, they changed into a pair of girls with spiky black hair and big grins.
“Hello, hello!” they cried.
“Hello, yourselves,” Jilly said.
She couldn’t help but grin back at them.
“We’ve come to take you home,” one of them said.
“You can’t say no.”
“Everyone will think it’s our fault if you don’t come.”
“And then we won’t get any sweets.”
“Not that we’re doing this for sweets.”
“No, we’re just very kind-hearted girls, we are.”
“Ask anyone.”
“Except for Raven.”
They were tugging on her hands now, each holding one of hers with two of their own.
“Don’t dawdle,” the one on her right said.
Jilly looked back at the buffalo man.
“Go on,” he said.
She shook her head. “Don’t be si
lly.”
For some reason that made the crow girls giggle.
“There’s no reason you can’t come, too,” she said. She turned to look at the crow girls. “There isn’t, is there?”
“Well… “one of them said.
“I suppose not.
“The door’s closed,” the buffalo man told them. “I can feel it inside, shut tight.”
“Your door’s closed,” one of the girls agreed.
“But hers is still open.”
Still he hesitated. Jilly pulled away from the crow girls and walked over to him.
“Half the trick to living large,” she said, “is the living part.”
He let her take him by the hand and walk him back to where the crow girls waited. Holding hands, with one of the spiky-haired girls on either side of them, they walked toward the mouth of the alleyway. But before they could get halfway there …
Jilly blinked and opened her eyes to a ring of concerned faces.
“We did it, we did it, we did it!” the crow girls cried.
They jumped up from Jilly’s side and danced around in a circle, banging into furniture, stepping on toes and generally raising more of a hullabaloo than would seem possible for two such small figures. It lasted only a moment before Lucius put a hand on each of their shoulders and held them firmly in place.
“And very clever you were, too,” he said as they squirmed in his grip. “We’re most grateful.”
Jilly turned to look at the man lying next to her on the sofa.
“How are you feeling?” she asked.
His gaze made a slow survey of the room, taking in the Kelledys, the professor, Lucius and the wriggling crow girls.
“Confused,” he said finally. “But in a good way.”
The two of them sat up.
“So you’ll stay?” Jilly asked. “You’ll see it through this time?”
“You’re giving me a choice?”
Jilly grinned. “Not likely.”
8
Long after midnight, the Kelledys sat in their living room, looking out at the dark expanse of their lawn. The crows were still roosting in the oaks, quiet now except for the odd rustle of feathers, or a soft, querulous croak. Lucius and the crow girls had gone back down the street to the Rookery, but not before the two girls had happily consumed more cookies, chocolates and soda pop than seemed humanly possible. But then, they weren’t human, they were corbae. The professor and Jilly had returned to their respective homes as well, leaving only a preoccupied buffalo man who’d finally fallen asleep in one of the extra rooms upstairs.
“Only a few more days until Christmas,” Cerin said.
“Mmm.”
“And still no snow.”
“Mmm.”
“I’m thinking of adopting the crow girls.”
Meran gave him a sharp look.
He smiled. “Just seeing if you were paying attention. What were you thinking of?”
“If there’s a word for a thing because it happens, or if it happens because there’s a word for it.”
“I’m not sure I’m following you.”
Meran shrugged. “Life, death. Good, bad. Kind, cruel. What was the world like before we had language?”
“Mercurial, I’d think. Like the crow girls. One thing would flow into another. Nothing would have really been separate from anything else because everything would have been made up of pieces of everything else.”
“It’s like that now.”
Cerin nodded. “Except we don’t think of it that way. We have the words to say this is one thing, this is another.”
“So we’ve lost… what? A kind of harmony?”
“Perhaps. But we gained free will.”
Meran sighed. “Why did we have to give up the one to gain the other?”
“I don’t know for sure, but I’d guess it’s because we need to be individuals. Without our differences, without our needing to communicate with one another, we’d lose our ability to create art, to love, to dream …”
“To hate. To destroy.”
“But most of us strive for harmony. The fact that we can fall into the darkness, is what makes our choice to reach for the light such a precious thing.”
Meran leaned her head on his shoulder.
“When did you become so wise?” she asked.
“When you chose me to be your companion on your journey into the light.”
Second Chances
There was a time, long ago, when speaking was a ceremony. This was before written laws and books and all the other little boxes we’ve got to put words in now. Back then, everything had a voice. The land, people, animals. It was all tribes, and words were a tribe of their own, a ceremony we could share with each other, an allowance that cut across species, connecting crow and woman and cedar and stream. Because everything was connected in those days. Still is, I guess, but we don’t see the pattern of it so clearly anymore. What we said had weight in those days because its effects could carry on for generations. We didn’t speak about the world, we spoke the world into being.
Those times are gone now. But every once in a while something stirs that old tribe and some of those words wake up. And then, for a moment, anything can happen.
I found myself in the Harp one night at the tail end of the year. It was a music night—not a session; they’d set up a little stage in one corner of the bar and the Kelledys were playing, harp and flute, a few songs, a lot of stories. I’d planned to stop in for a pint and then go, but the tunes got my foot tapping and the stories held me to the barstool. There are people that need stories, that can’t exist without them. I’m one of those people, always have been. Nose in a book, ear cocked for gossip, wouldn’t go to bed without a story and that lasted for a lot longer for me than it does for most kids. I still read for an hour or so before I go to sleep.
I didn’t recognize a lot of the tunes. They seemed to be mostly original, though in the tradition. But I picked out “Eliz Iza” not long after I got there, and later the flute player sang a haunting, wordless version of “Airde Cuan,” the harp backing her up with rich, resonating chords. I remembered both airs from this album by Alan Stivell that I played to death in the seventies. I hadn’t heard either of them, or the rest of the album for that matter, in years.
When the harper finished a story that he attributed to Seamus Ennis, about the origins of a piece called “The Gold Ring,” and the pair launched into the actual tune, I turned to the bar and ordered another Caffrey’s from the barman. A woman sat down beside me, but I barely noticed her. I had a sip of the beer, foam mustaching my upper lip, and returned my attention to the band.
“Joey?” she said. “Joey Straw?”
A closer look told me that I knew her but it still took me a moment to figure out from where. When I did, I couldn’t believe that it had taken any time at all. The black-rimmed glasses were what threw me off. The last time I’d seen Annie Ledford she’d been wearing contacts. I decided I liked the glasses. Combined with her short blonde hair and black jeans, they gave her a funky look.
“How’ve you been, Annie?” I said. “You’re looking great.”
She could still blush like a schoolgirl. I remember how that used to drive her crazy. I guess it still did, because she bent her head for a moment like she was checking out our footwear. Her eyes were bright behind the glasses when she looked up at me again. I wondered if it was the beer, or loneliness, or if she really was that happy to see me. Time’s a funny thing. Sometimes it exaggerates a memory; sometimes it just lets it fade away.
“I’ve been good,” she said. “It’s been forever, hasn’t it? What have you been up to?”
Nothing I could be proud of, but I figured this wasn’t show and tell. I didn’t have to go into details.
“Nothing much,” I told her. “I’ve been keeping a low profile. And you?”
Turned out she was a booking agent now. The reason she was here tonight was that she was the one who brought the Kelledys in for the weekend.
“Good choice,” I said.
She smiled. “Like it was a hard sell. They always draw a good crowd.”
Our conversation died then. I don’t get out much, and when I do, I usually keep to myself. But I felt I owed her something. An explanation, if nothing else.
“Look,” I said. “About the way I just walked out on you …”
“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s not like I didn’t hear about your brother.”
Yeah, Nicky had been a piece of work all right. He’d still be serving a life sentence in a federal pen for all the things he’d done if he hadn’t taken his own life in an NPD jail cell. He was finally arrested for killing a man in Fitzhenry Park, but that came after a lot of years on the run for the murder of his own family. I’ll never forget getting the call that night, my father’s choked voice as he told me what had happened.
“Everything changed that night,” I said, surprised to hear the words coming out of my mouth. “It wasn’t just finding out that Nicky was this monster, but the way everybody treated the rest of us. Like we were responsible. Like it was in our blood and we could snap any moment, just like he did. It broke my mother’s heart and my father’s spirit. My sister’s still not talking to any of us. I don’t know where she moved, I just know it was far.”
“And you?” she asked.
I shrugged.
“I tried calling you,” she said. “A lot.”
“I went away. I had to. I stopped answering the phone after the first reporter called. Just packed up and left the city.”
She didn’t say anything for a long moment. On the stage, the harper was announcing the last piece for this set. I had some more of my Caffrey’s. The room seemed awfully hot to me.
“I told myself you weren’t running away from me,” Annie said as the harp began to play a syncopated intro. “From us.”
“I wasn’t. In the end I realized I was just running away from myself.”
“So you came back.”
I nodded. “I got tired of drifting, doing piecework. But it hasn’t been much better since I got back.”
“Were you going to call me?”
I shook my head. “And say what? I figured you had a new life by now, a better one. The last thing you’d need was Nicky Straw’s brother back in it again.”