The Onion Girl

  You’re just not getting enough sleep, she told herself, rubbing at her temples.

  The doctor came in then and she concentrated on what he had to tell her after he’d examined Jilly.

  5

  Once upon a time …

  The forest seems familiar to me right away, but it takes me a moment to realize why. I stand there, absorbed by the towering trees that surround me on all sides, trees bigger and stranger than they have any right to be. There’s next to no undergrowth, just these behemoths, their trunks so wide that five of me couldn’t touch hands around them. Light pours down from the dense canopy above in golden shafts and that’s when I know where I am. The cathedral effect reminds me of what I call the place that Sophie goes traveling to at night.

  I’m back in the dreamlands again. The cathedral world.

  It’s not the city of Mabon that Sophie founded here, but a magic place all the same. It would have to be, wouldn’t it, with trees like this. They must be close cousins of what Jack Daw used to call the forever trees, the giant growth that made up the first forest when the world was born.

  I can’t believe that I’m finally able to cross over into the otherworld like this. While I’d prefer to be able to go in my body, dreaming my way across is certainly the next best thing. But I would like to learn how to choose where I end up, the way that Sophie can. I’ll have to ask her how she does it.

  Thinking of Sophie reminds me that I just saw her … or was that a dream, too? She really didn’t seem herself. Way too sad, for one thing. I know everyone can’t be as exuberant as I tend to be, but couldn’t she have shown just a little more enthusiasm that I’d learned how to cross over, too? Because now we can have adventures in the dreamlands together. And I’ll finally get to meet her mysterious boyfriend Jeck, that handsome crow boy that she can only be with in Mabon.

  Sometimes I just don’t get her. How can someone be so full of magic and still deny it the way she does? You only have to look at her to see the faerie blood in her, to know that she’s as magical as anything you could find in or out of the cathedral world.

  A little niggling thought comes worming up through my happiness. It’s got to do with that last time I saw her. I remember her starting to say something about accidents and cars, but I don’t want to go there. I don’t want the World As It Is to intrude on the magic I’m experiencing right now.

  I take a deep breath and look around some more, trying to empty my mind of everything except what’s happening at this moment. I want to exist in Zen time. No past, no future. Just now. Just being here.

  I think I’m alone until I smell the cigarette smoke. I turn in a slow circle and finally see a thin drift of it coming from the far side of one of the nearby trees. I head over, happy to have something new to focus on. When I get there, I find a guy sitting with his back against one of the trees, legs sprawled out in front of him. He’s wearing jeans, scuffed work boots, and a T-shirt with faded writing on it that I can just make out. Oh, and he’s got the head of a coyote or wolf, but I know who he is all the same.

  “Hey, Joe. I haven’t seen you for a while.”

  Joseph Crazy Dog’s the only guy I know who’d be wearing that “Don’t! Buy! Thai!” T-shirt in the dreamlands. Like they have boycotts here.

  Unlike Sophie, he’s up-front about his otherworld origins. The funny thing is, no one pays much attention to that. Most people just assume he’s this city Indian come down from the rez, living on the street, and he won’t take his meds. Or they know him as Bones, sitting in Fitzhenry Park, telling fortunes with a handful of what gave him his name, scattering the rodent and bird bones on a piece of deerskin, reading stories in how they fall. Stories about what’s been, what is, or what might be.

  The wolf head shimmers while I’m standing there, morphing into the face I know with its dark, coppery cast and broad features. Square chin, eyes set wide, nose flat. His long black hair’s tied back in a single braid festooned with feathers and beads. I’ve always loved his eyes. They shift like mercury, one moment the clown, one moment the wise man. Impossible to capture in a painting. I know; I’ve tried.

  Joe shrugs in response to my greeting. He takes another drag from his cigarette as I sit down beside him.

  “You know how it is,” he says. “I’m always crossing back and forth and you’ve been busy.”

  “It seems like I’m always busy. Maybe I spend too much time trying to be too many things for too many people.”

  “You wouldn’t be the first, though you do seem to have made more of a career of it than most. Could be this accident of yours is the spirits’ way of telling you to spend a little time on yourself for a change. Kind of like forcing the issue.”

  “What accident?”

  “See, that’s what I mean. You just don’t pay enough attention to yourself.”

  Sometimes Joe can drive me crazy with his obliqueness.

  “Is this one of your lessons?” I ask.

  Joe’s been working with me on and off for a couple of years now to prepare me to be able to cross over into the spiritworld like he does, walking in my body. The way that came about was out of this long conversation we had, back when Zeffy and Nia got lost in the otherworld. I wanted to accompany Joe while he was looking for them, but he wouldn’t let me.

  The way he put it was, “It’s dangerous for anybody, walking there in their own skin, but especially for someone like you. You’re like a magnet for the spirits, Jilly. Got a light inside you that shines too bright. I’ve told you, I can teach you how to navigate that place, but you’ve got to give me a few years so you can study it properly.”

  “But Sophie just goes there,” I said to him then.

  “Sure she does,” he told me. “Only she doesn’t go in her skin. She dreams her way across—she’d have to, seeing how she shines about as bright as you—and that’s the only way you can go, too, until you learn more.”

  “I don’t have those kind of dreams.”

  “Maybe you just don’t remember them.” He smiled at me, those crazy eyes of his grinning. “That light you carry’s got to have come from somewhere. I don’t know many people who shine so bright without having touched a spirit or two along the way.”

  “I guess,” I said. “I only wish I could be the one to decide when it happens.”

  “You’ve got to accept your blessings as they come. Most people don’t even get one, and when they do, they ignore it, or explain it away.”

  “I’m not ungrateful to be here,” I tell him now. “No matter how I got across. But I can’t help wanting more. I want to know that I can keep doing it. I want to be here like you. For real.”

  “This doesn’t feel real to you?” he asks.

  “You know what I mean.”

  He nods. “I guess I do.” He puts out his cigarette on the heel of his boot and stows the butt away in his pocket. “We always want more than what we’ve got.”

  “I don’t mean to sound greedy,” I tell him. “But I don’t want two lives like Sophie does—one in the World As It is, and one here. I’d feel too schizophrenic. I don’t know how Sophie does it.”

  “One’s real for her,” Joe says, “and one’s a dream. She puts each experience in what she figures is its appropriate compartment and it all comes out tidy.”

  That describes Sophie to a “T.” She’s as neat as I’m messy. I don’t know how she does that either. I can’t open a tube of paint without some of it immediately migrating to my fingers, my hair, my jeans …

  “Tidy,” I repeat. “That’s sure not me.”

  Joe laughs. “You don’t have to work at convincing me about that.”

  I could just whack him sometimes.

  “I mean I can’t divide my life up neatly like that,” I say. “If I’m going to have access to the spiritworld, I want to be able to bring my sketchbook across with me and then bring it back again. I’d like to carry over a tent and food and things so that I could stay awhile and not have to worry about shelter or eating roots and ber
ries.”

  The thing about traveling to the dreamlands the way Sophie does is that you can’t bring anything with you. You can’t bring anything back. Only the experience.

  “I hear you,” Joe says. “And we’ve been working on that with what I’ve been teaching you.”

  “I know. But finally being here, even just like this …”

  I see the understanding in his eyes. That understanding’s been there all along, but I had to explain how I feel all the same.

  “It’s hard to be patient,” he says.

  I nod.

  “We can work on it,” he says. “Being able to dream yourself over’s going to make everything go a lot quicker.”

  “When can we start?” I ask.

  He gives me an unhappy look.

  “First we have to deal with that accident,” he says.

  I start to shake my head. I don’t want to talk about it, whatever it is. But Joe’s not one to let you bury your head in the sand.

  “You’ve got a hard road ahead of you,” he tells me. “Maybe your being able to cross over like this is compensation for all the work you’ve got waiting for you back in the World As It is. Or maybe that bang on the head knocked loose whatever it is that lets people cross over in a dream.”

  I am shaking my head now. Joe just ignores it. He fixes that steady gaze of his on me, the clown gone. He’s all serious.

  “I brought in a couple of different healers,” he says. “Even asked the crow girls to look in on you. They all say the same thing. You’ve got to do the mending on your own. See, the problem is, there’s an older hurt, sitting there on the inside of you, and it’s blocking anybody’s attempts to speed the natural healing process of what’s wrong on the outside.”

  “What are you saying?”

  I don’t admit to anything, but some part of me knows what he’s trying to tell me. Just thinking about it makes me feel the pull back to the world I’ve left behind. I don’t want to go back.

  Joe hesitates, then tells me, “It’s like a part of you doesn’t want to get any better.”

  “I’m not even sick.”

  “Well, you don’t have the flu,” he says, “but you got banged up something bad. There’s no point in either of us pretending otherwise. And you and I both know there’s old hurts you’ve just hid away. Maybe you can turn up the wattage of that shine of yours to fool most people, but you don’t fool me.”

  “What kind of hurts are you talking about?”

  “If I knew, maybe I could help.”

  “You know the story of my life,” I say.

  He gives a slow nod of his head. “But I don’t know how you feel about it.”

  “This is such bullshit.”

  Joe sighs. “I’m just telling you how it is. If you didn’t want to know, you shouldn’t have asked.”

  It’s true. Joe rarely offers advice without first waiting to be asked. The trouble with advice is that it’s usually something you don’t want to hear.

  I have to look away. I let those wonderful trees fill my vision. Already they seem less present. Or maybe I am. I can feel the tug of my body, and it’s stronger. I don’t want to go back. I know what’s waiting for me now.

  “I’m sorry it worked out this way,” Joe says.

  I nod. “Me, too,” I tell him.

  “You deserve better.”

  I shrug. I don’t think the world works on merit. At least, not as much as we’d like it to.

  “We’ll find a way to beat it,” Joe tells me.

  And if we can’t?

  But I don’t say the words aloud. I touch his hand.

  “Don’t you worry about me, Joe,” I say. “I’m a survivor.”

  Then I let the pain reach across into the dreamlands and pull me back to that hospital bed. I hear his voice as I go, a faint sound, growing fainter.

  “There’s more to life than just surviving,” he says.

  I know that’s true. But I also know that sometimes just surviving is all you get.

  6

  It was getting to be like old home week, Wendy St. Clair thought as their friends continued to arrive. The waiting room was crowded, getting close to standing room only as the last seats were taken. There were so many familiar faces, Wendy felt she was at one of Izzy’s or Sophie’s gallery openings, except for the fact that everyone was far too glum.

  And Jilly wasn’t here.

  If there was something special going on in your life—a reading, a book signing, a gallery opening, a gig—you could always count on Jilly to be there to help you celebrate. Just as she was also there when the world bore down too hard and you needed a friend, someone to commiserate with. But tonight Jilly was a couple of rooms away, wires and tubes connecting her to the life support and monitoring machines, the Rackham pixie transformed into a creature from an H. R. Giger nightmare, and it was her friends who had gathered to lend each other what support they could, and to celebrate, in their quieter way, Jilly’s having come out of the coma.

  Professor Dapple, Christy, his girlfriend Saskia, and Alan were on one couch at the end of the room, with red-haired Holly sitting on the coffee table in front of them, looking perfectly at home between the piles of old magazines stacked on either side of her. Sophie, Sue, Isabelle, and Meran had commandeered the other couch that ran along the longer wall. Desmond and Meran’s husband Cerin were sitting on the floor between the two. Cassie had a Formica and metal chair that must have been borrowed from the cafeteria, while Wendy herself was sharing the only other seat with Mona. It was a stuffed chair with squared cushions and arms that was a really dreadful color of olive green. The two of them were taking turns sitting on one of the arms and the seat cushion.

  While they were missing a few faces—Geordie and Tanya were still in L.A. and Cassie’s husband Joe … well, who ever knew where Joe was?—it was still quite the turnout. But then Jilly inspired this kind of loyalty. If she was to die, half the city would probably show up for her funeral.

  Wendy put her hand to her mouth, even though she hadn’t spoken the words aloud.

  Oh, god, she told herself. Don’t even think such a thing.

  Mona touched her arm. “Are you okay?”

  Wendy nodded. Before she could fumble an explanation as to what had made her suddenly go so pale, the door to the waiting room opened and Lou Fucceri and Angel came in. Lou smelled like cigarette smoke, Angel of a blend of cardamom and ylang ylang oils.

  It was odd seeing the two of them like this. They hadn’t been an item for almost twenty years, but whenever Wendy saw them together, it was impossible for her not to think of them as a couple. Neither had gone on to get married, or even had a long-term relationship since they’d broken up, but they hadn’t tried to fix whatever had gone wrong between them either.

  Wendy thought it was their jobs. They both had careers rooted in heartbreak and frustration, neither of which allowed much emotional strength left over to work on a relationship. Because of those careers they had locked horns more often than not, disagreeing on the letter of the law and how the people who broke it were best served.

  Lou was a career policeman. He’d risen to the rank of lieutenant since Jilly first met him as a rookie street cop—when “my life began again,” as Jilly put it—without asking for or taking favors. He was a tall, broad-shouldered Italian whose people had a long history of either entering law enforcement or working for the Cerone family on the other side of the law, which could make holidays and birthdays strained affairs at the best of times.

  Angela Marceau was a counselor for street people and runaways. She had a walk-in office on Grasso Street and wasn’t above bending, if not outright breaking, the law if the safety of one of her charges was at stake. Wendy had first met her years ago and Angel was as gorgeous now as she’d been back then. She had a heart-shaped face, framed by a cascade of curly dark hair, and deep warm eyes. Her trim figure didn’t sport wings, and she leaned more toward baggy pants, T-shirts, and high-tops than she did harps and shimmering gown
s, but some of the street people claimed she really was a messenger from God, come down to help them. She certainly had the Botticelli image down, updated for present times.

  “Has she come to again?” Angel asked after she and Lou had said their hellos.

  Sophie shook her head. “But she’s out of the coma. The doctor said she’s just sleeping now.”

  “She’ll need all the rest she can get after that sort of trauma.”

  “Rest, Jilly,” Mona murmured from beside Wendy. “Somehow you don’t expect to hear those two words in the same sentence.”

  “Has there been any word on the driver of the car?” the professor asked Lou.

  Everyone fell quiet to hear his response. Lou got an uncomfortable expression and a horrible feeling shivered through Wendy.

  Don’t tell us, she wanted to say. If it’s more bad news, just don’t tell us.

  But they had to know. That was the only way to face your fears. You can’t stand up to the night until you understand what’s hiding in its shadows, someone had told her once.

  “There’s been a complication,” Lou finally said. “Dispatch got a call late this afternoon from Jilly’s landlady …” He looked old, sagging in on himself, as though having to describe what had happened was more than he could bear. “Somebody trashed the studio. I mean they really had themselves a time. They cut her paintings into ribbons, pulled everything out of her drawers and shelves, and went to town tossing it around. The place looks like a hurricane hit it. Everything reeks of turpentine and solvents. But it’s the paintings …”

  He shook his head. All those years on the street, with all he must have seen, and still this had obviously gotten to him. Maybe because it was personal, Wendy thought. Because it had happened to a friend.

  “Who could ever do this to Jilly?” he said. “Who could hate her that much?”