The Onion Girl

  “Get out of here,” I tell him. “You got what you wanted. My sister’s dead and everything’s good now in dreamland, so why don’t you just go away and leave us alone.”

  Jack doesn’t say anything for a long moment. I get the sense he’s about to turn and go away, but then everything changes again.

  2

  Hearing all the voices coming from the gulch as he approached, Toby crept the last few yards, crouching down behind a fallen tree when he reached the top of the ridge. He peered down, then hastily pulled his head back out of sight. Canids. Two—three. So many of them. His pulse, already pounding because of the long run back from the vervain field, quickened still more.

  He swallowed thickly, afraid almost to move. But the more he heard, the more he knew he couldn’t stay hiding up here.

  As her dreaming self, Jilly wouldn’t be strong enough to stand up to so many of the People, all at once. But she had that light in her, shining so strong. The spirit of the Greatwood was on her side—it had to be. Hadn’t it allowed her to claim the twigs the way she had? If she could be reunited with her broken self, if what she called the Broken Girl was healed and the two were one, hale and strong, perhaps she would have a chance.

  So reluctantly, he rose to his feet. With the vervain wreath in hand, the blue flowers and sweet-smelling leaves intertwined with cream-colored flower heads of yarrow and that one piece of Greatwood magic, he topped the ridge and started down into the gulch.

  3

  NEWFORD

  Sophie sighed. Tonight was like the vigil when Jilly had been in her coma all over again except there weren’t as many of them in attendance this time. And there wasn’t a comatose body on the bed.

  They waited in the hall of the rehab building where Jilly had disappeared. She, Wendy, and Cassie sat on the floor, all in a row, she and Wendy with their legs pulled up to their chests, arms around their knees, Cassie with her legs stretched out, crossed at the ankles. After registering shock at seeing Wendy and Cassie reenter the rehab through the same section of hall that they’d disappeared through earlier, Lou had spent most of his time pacing back and forth until Angel arrived. Now the two of them stood farther down the hall, conversing in quiet voices.

  Sophie glanced in their direction. When it came to Jilly, they were like divorced parents. Lou had taken her off the street and brought her to his social worker girlfriend who had gotten her into a detox program and then helped her finish high school and get into university. Though Jilly treated them both as friends now, in those early years they had been like surrogate parents—the ones Jilly should have had, instead of the ones she’d gotten.

  When Lou and Angel broke up, Jilly had confessed to Sophie that she felt like the kid caught up in her parents’ divorce. She loved them both and knew they loved each other, so the acrimonious breakup had been all that much harder to take. Jilly carried the child’s guilt for a parents’ divorce as well. While she knew she wasn’t personally responsible, it was because of Lou’s and Angel’s differing perspectives on how Angel’s clients such as Jilly should be treated that had led to the breakup.

  But tonight, as had happened when Jilly was in her coma, their differences were set aside and they were united in their worry and grief.

  Sophie had considered calling some of Jilly’s other friends, but hadn’t known what she’d say to most of them. She was now willing to accept that this kind of thing could happen, that two women could waltz into the rehab and carry Jilly off into the dreamlands by stepping through a wall, but to try to explain it to anyone else besides Christy or the professor would take far more energy than she could summon.

  Better to wait, she told herself. At least get through the night. Cassie had assured them that Joe and his friends would be able to rescue Jilly, so it was just a matter of holding tight. Any moment now, Joe would come back from the dreamlands with Jilly and any explanations that were needed could be given by Jilly herself in her usual exuberant style.

  But the minutes dragged into hours and there was still no sign of either of them. Sophie wasn’t giving up, but her anxiety grew in direct proportion to the passing of time. It was two-thirty now, almost five hours since Jilly had been spirited away. She didn’t want to think about what could be taking so long. She knew all too well that danger lay as thick in the dreamlands as wonder.

  She glanced at Wendy, sitting beside her. Although Wendy was carrying a soft radiance about her from her own brief visit into the dreamlands, she’d been oddly subdued ever since her return. Sophie reached over and gave her hand a squeeze.

  “It’ll be okay,” she said, putting all of her own hope into the assurance.

  “I guess. It’s just …”

  “Just what?”

  Wendy sighed and shook her head.

  “I feel like such a shit,” she said. “Now that I’ve been over there, I know how it is for you. How could you not want to be there?”

  “What are you talking about?” Sophie asked.

  “I was just feeling … left out.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of the three of us. There were you and Jilly, both going into the dreamlands now, and I was turning into the third wheel.”

  “It would never have been like that.”

  “I know,” Wendy said. “But it felt like it. And the worst thing is, I could have prevented all of this.”

  Sophie gave her a blank look.

  Wendy sighed. “Jilly knew something was up. Maybe she guessed how I was feeling, or at least knew I was feeling something weird. She sent me a message through Angel to come and talk to her about it, but I got caught up at work and then, instead of coming over right after, I went out to dinner with everybody.”

  “I still don’t understand how that puts you at fault.”

  “Don’t you see?” Wendy said. “If I’d come earlier, I would have been here when those horrible women took Jilly away. I could have stopped them.”

  “Or you could have been hurt.”

  “Maybe. But before I did I would have raised a stink and maybe the security guards would have got here in time.”

  “Oh, Wendy,” Sophie said, putting her arm around her friend’s shoulders. “I can see why you’re feeling the way you do, but you really can’t blame yourself for this.”

  Tears welled in Wendy’s eyes.

  “It’s just …” she began, then had to start over. “I don’t want maybe the last thing Jilly thought of me to be that I was angry with her or something.”

  She got a pained look on her face, as though by simply expressing her fears, she might have made them real. Sophie hugged her.

  “Jilly’d never think that,” she said. “And we’d never have left you behind in anything.”

  “Joe will bring her back,” Cassie assured them from the other side of Wendy. “Trust in him.”

  “We do,” Sophie said.

  But the waiting was still so hard.

  4

  MANIDÒ-AKÌ

  Everybody turns when Toby comes down the slope, one hand holding on to saplings for balance and to slow his descent, the other carrying a wreath of blue flowers, leaves, and twigs that seems to glimmer and glow.

  You didn’t desert me, I think.

  In the midst of everything else that’s going on, that seems like a big deal. An anchor that I can hold on to with my sister dead on the ground in front of me and these two canids with their hard cruel words. At times, they make it so that I can hardly breathe. Then I want to lash out at them, at myself, at the dead bodies of Pinky and Raylene, the one for killing my sister, the other for dying.

  I focus on the wreath that Toby’s carrying. At first I think it’s for Raylene and I wonder how he knew she’d died, but then I realize what it is, who it’s for, where he went to in such a hurry when he ran off. He went to that field of magic flowers he’d told me about. He plucked the blossoms he found there and wove them into a wreath for me. To break the spell that the Broken Girl has over me.

  But we’re way past that
now.

  “I know that little man,” Nanabozho says. “He’s always sneaking around in the Greatwood, spying on people.”

  Jack nods. “An Eadar.”

  There’s something in the way they’re talking that makes me realize Toby wasn’t so far off in his judgment of the People. They’re discussing him the way people do the scrawny stray cats in my neighborhood, which isn’t with affection. I’m happy to see that Joe doesn’t seem to feel the same—I’m not sure what. Mild antagonism, maybe. Or a kind of annoyed indifference. And then I realize that the pit bull never even growled at Toby’s approach.

  “What are you doing here?” Jack asks Toby. “Who are you spying for today?”

  “He’s not a spy,” I say. I get up from where I’m kneeling beside Raylene’s body. “He’s with me. He’s my friend.”

  And then Toby’s standing beside me. He straightens his back and gives back as good a hard stare as he’s getting—which surprises me, considering how he usually runs away from any encounter with one of the People.

  “I’m not an Eadar anymore,” he tells them.

  Joe gets to his feet as well and all three of the canids study Toby for a long moment.

  “Well done,” Joe says finally.

  I don’t know what the other two canids are thinking, but I get the distinct impression that “well done” isn’t a part of it. I’m beginning to get a bead on them and I think I know their type now. They don’t like change—at least not when they haven’t instigated it themselves, and especially not when it doesn’t leave them at the top of the food chain. I wonder what new snide remark they’ll make.

  “There’s a scent in the air,” Nanabozho says instead. “Something familiar, but I can’t put a name to it.”

  He disappoints me the most. I’d liked him when he came by to talk to me in the Greatwood. Now he’s as much a stranger as Whiskey Jack, his cousin in the flat-brimmed black hat.

  Jack’s nodding in agreement. “Old. Deep.”

  “And worrisome,” Nanabozho adds. “But I don’t know why.”

  I glance at Joe. I can see his own nostrils flaring, those eyes of his that never miss anything looking around. When he sees my gaze on him, he shrugs.

  “There’s something in the air,” he agrees, turning back to his cousins. “But worrisome? It doesn’t feel like that to me. It feels more like my abinàs-odey—my heart home—though it’s far from this place.”

  “And that doesn’t worry you?” Jack asks.

  “No, it just makes me curious.”

  Jack shakes his head. “Something’s here that knows us too well.”

  “I’ve nothing to hide from anyone,” Joe says, “so I have nothing to fear.”

  “This is older than that,” Nanabozho says. “This is older than secrets and fear. It reminds me of my visitor, back at Cody’s mountain.”

  The three canids exchange glances and I want to ask them what they mean, who they’re talking about. But Toby plucks at my sleeve, distracting me. When I turn to him, he hands me the wreath.

  “Put it on the Broken Girl,” he says. “It will break the spell, I know it will. But I also think it will heal her. And you. Both of you.”

  When the wreath is in my hands, I start to understand what the canids are feeling. It’s like the air around us has gone completely still. As though the forest, the rocks, everything, is holding its breath. And then I see the twig from the Greatwood tree, woven into the flowers. It’s not just a wreath of that healing vervain Toby told me about earlier, there’s another, older magic involved in what he’s thinking—something that’s sure to work. The twig didn’t do anything for me as my dreaming self, but on the flesh and blood of the Broken Girl it should be effective.

  She could be healed, whole again.

  I could be healed.

  My gaze drops from the wreath in my hands to the body of my sister lying on the ground at my feet.

  But by that same token, I find myself thinking, if there is such powerful magic in that twig that can work on dead nerves and broken flesh, might it not also work to raise the newly dead? These are the dreamlands, after all. The land of fairy tales. Toby said the magic of the Greatwood twigs could create a miracle. What better use for a miracle than to save my sister?

  Now. Here. Where I can. To make up for where I didn’t before.

  As soon as it comes to me, I know it’s what I have to do.

  “Are you certain of your choice?”

  I blink at yet another new voice, but this one seems to come out to me from a secret place, out of the inheld breath that everything around me is holding. I find that I’m sitting on the ground again, the wreath held against my chest. Slowly, I lower the rough circle of leaves and blue flowers to my lap and look up from my sister’s body.

  A moment ago the gulch was crowded. There was the Broken Girl and Toby. The corpses of Pinky Miller and my sister. The three canids and the dog that came with Joe. Now it’s just my dreaming self, sitting back on my knees beside my dead sister. Everyone else is gone.

  But I’m not alone.

  The woman who spoke stands where Joe had been only a heartbeat before. She reminds me of Nokomis, the White Buffalo Woman I saw that one time in the Greatwood. I’m sure it’s her, even though I never saw her with a human face such as the one this stranger has. There’s just this familiarity about her and there’s no one else remotely similar to her in my experience. The stranger’s face is round as the full moon, surrounded by a cloud of dark, curling hair, thick as a forest. Her complexion is a coppery brown while her eyes are old beyond measure, distant and mysterious, deep and warm at the same time.

  We’re not in the gulch anymore, either. Around me are the cathedral trees of the Greatwood—or trees like them. These appear even older. Taller and broader of trunk, if that’s possible. Cloaked with mystery, yet shining with an inner light that seems to emanate from the bark itself.

  I return my attention to the woman. She has the same light in her eyes. She smiles and the shiver of fear that’s been creeping up my spine falls away. I’m not so sure she’s Nokomis now. I’m not really sure of anything anymore.

  “Who … who are you?” I finally manage to ask.

  That beatific smile of hers widens slightly. “I don’t have a name, child, though I’ve been given many. If you need a reference for me, think of me as the spirit Raven called up to inhabit the first forest in the long ago—those echoes of the forever trees where life began.”

  “So … you are Nokomis.”

  She shakes her head. “We are more like sisters. She is the earth, I am the wood. There are others like us … in the first ocean, the first river, the first hill …”

  “How come she has a name, but you don’t?”

  “She doesn’t have a name any more than I do. Nokomis is simply a name she has been called.”

  “You don’t like names?”

  She shrugs. “We ignore names for how they can lock you into a set state of being. We are always shifting, you see—never one thing or the other, but many things all at once. I have been called Mystery and Fate. I have been called the White Deer Woman.” She looks down at the body of my sister that lies between us. “I have been called Choice.”

  It comes back to me, that first thing she asked. The words that drew me out of the gulch, where I’d been standing with the others, to this place that seems so much older and deeper than anywhere I’ve been in the dreamlands so far.

  Are you certain of your choice?

  Kneeling down beside my sister’s body, I lift the wreath Toby brought me and hug it against my chest. The woman looms over me until she lowers herself to the ground on the other side of Raylene, moving with such grace that she appears as cloudlike as her hair, gently floating, a stranger to gravity.

  “Are you asking if I think it’s the right thing to do?” I say.

  “If you wish.”

  That seems like an odd answer, but I find myself shaking my head and responding to her instead of asking what she means.
I feel oddly disassociated and realize I’ve been like that since the canids first arrived back in the gulch. The grief for my sister waits like a tsunami, an enormous wave, poised above me, ready to fall. But for now I can both feel it, and be in this other moment at the same time. Talking with a stranger rather than folding in on my grief and letting it bear me away.

  “I don’t know if it’s right or wrong,” I say. “Back … where we were before … they told me she’s been doing terrible things. But I feel this needs to be done anyway. It’s what I have to do since I already abandoned her once. If this can work, how could I turn my back on her again? Everybody deserves a second chance, don’t they?”

  I try to read an answer in her eyes, but the mystery in them only seems to deepen.

  “Perhaps,” she says. “If they would actually make use of it. Do you think your sister would?”

  I look at Raylene’s still features, the blood smeared across her eyelids.

  “I … I don’t know,” I say.

  “And then,” she goes on, “you must also consider, would your brother deserve the same chance?”

  I’m shaking my head before the words can come out of my mouth.

  “No,” I tell her, emphatic. “What he did to us was purely evil.”

  “But surely he wasn’t born bad either? You said yourself that no one is.”

  I close my eyes. She’s making this too hard.

  “I feel like you’re trying to talk me out of this,” I say.

  She shakes her head. “I only want you to be aware of why you are making this choice.” She pauses, then adds, “Do you forgive your sister for the things she’s done?”

  I shake my head. “It’s not for me to forgive—that’s something she’d have to take up with the ones she hurt. I can only forgive her for what she’s done to me and hope she’ll do the same.”

  “And if she doesn’t?”

  “It doesn’t matter. I’ll still forgive her.”

  “What if I told you that she would mock you for making this choice?”