At least about my art. I hope he can’t read my heart. But then Geordie’s always been a little obtuse about whether or not a woman’s taken a liking to him. So I have that going for me. To keep my secret safe, I mean.
There’s a point where we run out of words for a while and just sit there, enjoying each other’s company. That’s something else I’ve missed since he moved. Just this being together with him. But then I realize he’s studying me.
“What?” I say. “Did the nurse forget to wipe my lunch from my face?”
He shakes his head. “No. There’s just something different about you.”
“Hello? I can’t get up out of this bed. I can’t paint. I can’t even scratch my own nose.”
“It’s not that,” he says. You can tell what old friends we are because he hasn’t once gotten that awkward look most people do when they realize just how broken I am. “It’s something else.”
I guess I was wrong and he’s not so obtuse, because I know what he’s feeling. It’s me, reaching for him. Wanting him to crawl up onto the bed beside me and just hold me until everything’s better. How could he not feel it? But I can’t even begin to tell him that. So I talk about the dreamlands instead.
Time was, a conversation like this would have driven him crazy. Back when we first met at the post office—filling in as part-timers during the Christmas rush one year—I’d deliberately tell him the most outlandish stories, just to get a rise out of him. He was Mr. Pragmatic in those days. A lovely boy, but give him what he could see with his own two eyes, what he could touch with his hands, or don’t bother. I think a lot of that came from how his brother Christy had plunged so wholeheartedly into an exploration of the weird and the wacky and in those days they weren’t getting along nearly as well as they do now. My flights of fancy just reminded him too much of Christy.
But he’s seen and experienced an odd thing or two in the years since. Right now I find him listening with interest, and dare I say it, even belief in what I’m telling him about the Greatwood and Mabon and the people I’ve met there.
“It would have to take something like this happening to let you get across,” he says. “Trust you not to take the easy route.”
“Oh, Geordie, me lad,” I tell him. “Haven’t you discovered by now that there’s never an easy route to the things that matter.”
He nods, that sad look when he talks about his life in L.A. coming back into his eyes.
“Isn’t that the truth,” he says.
I send him home that Monday, back to Tanya. Maybe the music scene in L.A. isn’t everything he’s looking for in terms of his career, but he and Tanya have a potentially great thing happening between them, and we both knew he needed to give it a real shot.
I take comfort from the pain of his departure by retreating into the dreamlands whenever I’m not needed to be present in my body for therapy sessions.
2
Sophie was having a bad day. After a couple of weeks of relative quiet, Jinx had started acting up something fierce this morning. Her TV had been showing British game shows since she first woke up and no matter how often she shut it off, the set came back on its own. More aggravating were the collect calls she kept being asked to accept from places like Hong Kong, Melbourne, and Bogotá—the South American one, not the one in New Jersey. Not to mention her door buzzer, which sounded every fifteen minutes or so. She’d long since stopped going to answer the door, so when Wendy dropped by later in the day she had to bang on the door with the heel of her hand for ages before Sophie finally came down the hall to let her in.
Wendy gave her a considering look, then asked, “Jinx?”
Sophie gave a weary nod and led the way back into the living room where she’d been watching a snooker game that was being broadcast from Wales with all the commentary in Welsh.
“I kind of thought so,” Wendy said as she settled in a chair. “I tried calling from work before I came, but your phone’s out of order.”
“I had to unplug it.”
“Electronic telemarketers?”
“Not this time,” Sophie said. “This time it was collect calls from all over the world.”
Wendy smiled. “But you didn’t take any.”
“I’m not Jilly.”
They both laughed. Jilly would have happily chatted to whoever was on the other end of the line, never mind if she understood their language or not.
“Speaking of Jilly,” Wendy said. “Isabelle was out walking on Yoors Street and swore she saw Jilly across the street. But when she called out to her, Jilly ducked into a convenience store. Isabelle said she was so sure it actually was Jilly that she crossed the street and went inside herself, but there were no customers in there at all and she felt weird asking the proprietor if anyone had just come in and then slipped out the back door, so she just left.”
“Except Jilly’s in rehab,” Sophie said.
“Of course she is. Whoever Isabelle saw just really looked like Jilly. But don’t you think it’s weird?”
Sophie nodded. Except she’d seen that doppelgänger herself, not two days ago outside of Jilly’s loft. She’d been up early and after doing some grocery shopping, she’d gone by the loft to bring the mail in, put out a bowl of cat kibbles on the fire escape for the strays that Jilly fed, and check to make sure that everything was undisturbed, just as she’d been doing every day since the break-in. Halfway down the block from the loft, she’d seen the impossible: Jilly coming out of the door of her building and turning up the street, away from her.
She’d been so startled that she’d dropped the bag of groceries she was carrying. Her gaze was pulled down to the fallen bag, then followed a tin of peas rolling off into the gutter. By the time she looked up again, whoever it was that she’d mistaken for Jilly was gone. But the whole incident had left her shaken in a way she couldn’t explain, as though a piece of her dreaming night world had strayed into the World As It Is. She’d found herself shivering then, and felt the same chill now.
“What’s the matter?” Wendy asked.
For a moment, Sophie had trouble focusing on her friend and could only manage a distracted, “Mmm?”
“You’ve gone all pale,” Wendy said.
Sophie remembered to breathe, then gave a wan smile.
“I had that same experience a couple of days ago,” she finally said. “When I went by the loft.”
“And you never told me?” Wendy said after Sophie had described what she’d seen that day.
“This is the first time I’ve seen you since then and I kind of forgot about it.”
Which was odd in itself.
“Oh, this is too spooky,” Wendy told her. “Remember what Cassie was saying when she went by the loft after the break-in?”
Sophie nodded. Cassie was something of a sensitive and had dropped in at the studio to see if she could pick up any psychic traces of whoever it was that had broken in and destroyed all of Jilly’s faerie paintings. She said she’d found traces, if you were the sort to give credence to that kind of thing, but they all pointed to Jilly. Only not the Jilly they knew. Instead, Cassie had described it as though some shadow Jilly had come in and vandalized the paintings.
“I keep wondering about that,” Wendy said. “I mean, if that’s the reason she doesn’t seem to care about having lost all of those paintings.”
Sophie gave her a blank look.
“You know,” Wendy went on. “If her spirit came back to the loft while she was in the coma and destroyed all those paintings.”
“Wendy.”
“Stranger things have happened.”
Sophie sighed. When it came to Jilly, she supposed that wasn’t all that far off the mark. Though she herself wasn’t entirely comfortable with the whole concept of the dreamlands intruding into the World As It Is, the odd and the peculiar seemed to be attracted to Jilly like burrs were to the cuffs of your jeans when you went tramping through an autumn field.
“She loved those paintings too much to destroy them,??
? Sophie said.
“But if she has this dark side …”
“We all have a dark side, but it doesn’t go off wandering about on its own. Especially not when we’re in a coma, or laid up in the hospital.”
“I suppose,” Wendy said. “But I’m worried about her reaction. Or maybe I should say, her lack of reaction.”
Sophie shrugged. “It probably hasn’t really sunk in yet. It’s not like she doesn’t have other things on her mind.”
But she could tell that Wendy wasn’t ready to let this go.
“I don’t know,” Wendy said. “It’s not that I’m wishing some great depression on her—Lord knows she’s got enough to worry about as it is—but she’s lost a lifetime of work. Those are all the paintings she really cared about, the ones that she’d hang in shows with the ‘Not for Sale’ tags on them.”
Sophie thought how she’d feel if she’d had this kind of loss. It was hard to imagine. She’d probably react the way Isabelle had when her studio burned down—totally, completely displaced from everything. Especially from her art. She remembered how Isabelle said it hurt just to walk into a studio or gallery, to even think of starting to paint again.
“I suppose Jilly’s reaction is odd,” she said.
“It’s more than odd,” Wendy said. “It’s taking relentless good cheer to a new and really scary height.”
“That’s just Jilly’s way of dealing with it.”
Wendy nodded. “But you know what scares me the most? That maybe she sees it as a sign. Like she’s being told that now it’s okay to go off into fairyland forever, because one by one, all the things she cares about are being stripped away from her.”
“She can’t go to fairyland forever,” Sophie told her.
“Oh? And why’s that?”
“Because it’s not real. It’s just dreams and fancies.”
“And if she just lets herself drift away into a coma and dreams away forever?”
Sophie shook her head. “That’s not happening. She’s been working hard at the rehab, strengthening muscles, exercising. A week or so ago, maybe I’d have agreed with you. But it’s obvious now that she’s determined to get better.”
“It still worries me,” Wendy said. “There’s something going on here that she’s not telling us.”
“What’s to tell?”
“Her visits to the dreamlands, for one thing. A couple of weeks ago, that’s all she wanted to talk about. Now she barely mentions it, and if you ask, she just shrugs it off and wants to be brought up-to-date on what’s going on with everybody.”
Sophie gave a slow nod. That much was true. Jilly had been so excited about being able to dream herself into the spiritworld, and with Jilly, excitement equaled enthusiastic, blow-by-blow descriptions and discussions. But now she hardly talked about it at all. Sophie had thought it was just because she herself wouldn’t allow that dreams were anything but dreams and rather than argue about it anymore, Jilly had just stopped talking about it with her.
“What can we do?” she said.
It was more a rhetorical question, but Wendy leaned forward in her chair. “We have to keep watch over her.”
“I suppose …”
“And maybe you could check in on her in the dreamlands.”
“I can’t do that,” Sophie said.
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. Whenever I go to Mabon I run into people she’s met, but there seems to be some kind of veil between where she goes and I do.” She smiled. “We’re just never in the same dream, I guess.”
“But the dreamlands …” Wendy began.
“I don’t know what they are,” Sophie told her. “Maybe it’s a place where our collective unconscious can gather and experience things together, and maybe it’s something else again. I just don’t see how it can affect the real world—beyond influencing our art, say, or just making for good stories we can share with each other.”
“But you’ve met people from the World As It Is in Mabon.”
Sophie had to give a reluctant nod. “Except I don’t know what that proves, if anything. I just know that I can’t seem to find Jilly when I’m dreaming.”
“There’s got to be something we can do to make sure she’s okay. I mean, mentally.”
Sophie had to smile. “That could be a loaded question.”
“I’m being serious,” Wendy said, but she smiled as well.
“I know you are,” Sophie told her. “I’ll have another talk with Jilly when I go see her tonight.”
Wendy wanted to know more then about this mysterious twin that both she and Isabelle had seen and Sophie was happy to oblige, though she didn’t have many more details to share than those she’d already given.
“But I guess the oddest thing,” she said, “was—you know how you sometimes mistake a stranger for someone you know, but when you look again, or more closely, the resemblance is so superficial that you have to wonder what it was that made you feel so sure about it in the first place?”
Wendy nodded.
“It wasn’t like that with the woman I saw outside of the loft. Yes, I only got that one brief glimpse of her, but there was no question in my mind that if it wasn’t Jilly I’d just seen, then she’s got a twin we don’t know about.”
And that was probably what had bothered her the most about the incident. That she was so sure it had been Jilly she’d seen, impossible though that was. She’d almost told Jilly about it when she went to the rehab later that morning, but when she walked into the room and saw her lying there, the casts on her arm and leg, the paralyzed arm lying limply on the sheet beside her on the bed, the idea that Jilly could have been up and about anywhere was so ludicrous that she hadn’t said a word.
But the question had returned to nag her since. Sophie had a good eye. She might have to contend with Jinx playing havoc on all things electrical and mechanical in her general vicinity when it decided to show up for a visit, but she also was a keen observer who could render a fairly recognizable sketch of a person after only a cursory glance.
Maybe she’d talk to Jilly about that tonight as well.
3
Once upon a time …
All forests have their own personality. I don’t just mean the obvious differences, like how an English woodland is different from a Central American rain forest, or comparing tracts of West Coast redwoods to the saguaro forests of the American Southwest. Or even the more subtle differences, like how the piney wood hills that back up onto the rez north of Newford are nothing like the cedar and birch forests around Tyler where I grew up, and there’s less than a hundred miles between the two.
But even when they seem to be the same—two stretches of hemlock woods, a seemingly similar pair of tamarack and scrub tree forests—they each have their own gossip, their own sound, their own rustling whispers and smells. A voice speaks up when you enter their acres that can’t be mistaken for one you’d hear anyplace else, a voice true to those particular trees, individual rather than of their species.
So it’s no surprise that the Greatwood is so singular. What is surprising is how it also seems to be the sum of all forests at the same time. Never mind the towering heights of its trees, some of them with girths as wide as a Crowsea tenement building. When you step under the shadow of the Greatwood’s twilight reaches, you hear a voice you immediately recognize as the deep rumbling murmur that you’ve heard whispering up from under the individual voices of any forest you’ve ever been in.
I guess this is what Joe means about the Greatwood being such a close echo of the First Forest, the vast woodland that covered everything when Raven first made the world. When you’re standing under this enormous canopy, it’s easy to imagine that you’ve been transported back to the beginnings of time.
These days I spend most of my dreamlands time here in the Greatwood, sticking close to where I first arrived and met Joe. Like the hospital, I have lots of visitors when I’m under its canopy, but they haven’t come to say hello to the Broken Girl, s
tudiously looking away from the bandaged shape of her body under the sheets. It’s just people passing by, stopping to say hello, standing to look over my shoulder when I’m drawing, happy to share a few quiet moments before they travel on.
I’m meeting most of them for the first time, and don’t see them again, but there are a few regulars. These ones are mostly friends of Joe’s, or related to him in some way, like Jolene, and this guy who calls himself Nanabozho, who could have been Joe’s twin brother with that same canid head on his human shoulders, except his coloring runs more to wolf grays than Joe’s chestnut fur and he’s got these mismatched eyes: the right one’s brown, the left one’s a steel-blue gray. Nanabozho’s like Toby, always wanting me to draw him. I don’t mind. There’s something wonderfully strange about those lupine features looking out at me from under the flat-brimmed hat he wears, the startling juxtapositioning of animal head on a human body, with the long dark braids framing either side of his face.
I keep hoping the crow girls will drop by, but the only corbæ I meet are a couple of Jack Daw’s cousins, dark-haired siblings with a Kickaha cast to their broad features. They introduce themselves as Candace and Matt, the one ganglier than the other, but handsome in a way Jack never was. While they’re chatty, and certainly as friendly as Jack used to be, they’re full of gossip instead of the wonderful stories he used to tell. I guess Katy Bean, the red-haired girl who took over Jack’s school bus on the edge of the Tombs, inherited his storytelling gift as well as that old bus.
Once, watching me from a distance, I see a woman with a white buffalo’s head on her shoulders. The whole forest goes still while she’s here. Even the Greatwood’s rumbling voice quiets to a barely discernible murmur. I want to talk to her so badly, but my throat goes all dry, and I can barely breathe, never mind get up and go over to where she’s standing.