“You never told me any of this,” I say.
“No, I didn’t. Why should I? Was it going to make any difference to your dreams?”
I shook my head. “I guess not.”
“When you took to that old guitar of mine the way you did, my heart near broke. I was so happy for you, but I was scared—oh, I was scared bad. But then I thought, maybe it’ll be different for her. Maybe when she leaves the hills and starts singing, people are gonna listen. I wanted to spare you the hurt, I’ll tell you that, Darlene, but I didn’t want to risk stealing your chance at joy neither. But now . . .”
Her voice trails off.
“But now,” I say, finishing what she left unsaid, “here I am anyway and I don’t even have those pines to keep me company.”
Hickory nods. “It ain’t fair. I hear the music they play on the radio now and they don’t have half the heart of the old mountain songs you and me sing. Why don’t people want to hear them anymore?”
“Well, you know what Dolly says: Life ain’t all a dance.”
“Isn’t that the sorry truth.”
“But there’s still people who want to hear the old songs,” I say. “There’s just not so many of them. I get worn out some days, trying like I’ve done all these years, but then I’ll play a gig somewhere and the people are really listening and I think maybe it’s not so important to be really big and popular and all. Maybe there’s something to be said for pleasing just a few folks, if it means you get to stay true to what you want to do. I don’t mean a body should stop aiming high, but maybe we shouldn’t feel so bad when things don’t work out the way we want ’em to. Maybe we should be grateful for what we got, for what we had.”
“Like all those afternoons we spent playing music with only the pines to hear us.”
I smile. “Those were the best times I ever had. I wouldn’t change ’em for anything.”
“Me, neither.”
“And you know,” I say. “There’s people with a whole lot less. I’d like to be doing better than I am, but hell, at least I’m still making a living. Got me an album and I’m working on another, even if I do have to pay for it all myself.”
Hickory gives me a long look and then just shakes her head. “You’re really something, aren’t you just?
“Nothing you didn’t teach me to be.”
“I been a damn fool,” Hickory says. She sets Earle aside and stands up. “I can see that now.”
“What’re you doing?” I ask. But I know and I’m already standing myself.
“Come give your old aunt a hug,” Hickory says.
There’s a moment when I can feel her in my arms, solid as one of those pines growing up the hills where she first taught me to sing and play. I can smell woodsmoke and cigarette smoke on her, something like apple blossoms and the scent of those pines.
“You do me proud, girl,” she whispers in my ear.
And then I’m holding only air. Standing there alone, all strolloped up in my wig and rhinestone dress, holding nothing but air.
8
I know I won’t be able to sleep and there’s no point in trying. I’m feeling so damn restless and sorry—not for myself, but for all the broken dreams that wear people down until there’s nothing left of ’em but ashes and smoke. I’m not going to let that happen to me.
I end up sitting back on the sofa with my guitar on my lap—the same small-bodied Martin guitar my Aunt Hickory gave a dreamy-eyed girl all those years ago. I start to pick a few old tunes. “Over the Waterfall.” “The Arkansas Traveler.” Then the music drifts into something I never heard before and I realize I’m making up a melody. About as soon as I realize that, the words start slipping and sliding through my head and before I know it, I’ve got me a new song.
I look out the window of my little apartment. The wind’s died down, but the snow’s still coming, laying a soft blanket that takes the sharp edge off everything I can see. It’s so quiet. Late night quiet. Drifting snow quiet. I get a pencil from the kitchen and I write out the words to that new song, write the chords in. I reread the last lines of the chorus:
But my Aunt Hickory loved me,
and nothing else mattered
nothing else mattered at all.
There’s room on the album for one more song. First thing in the morning I’m going to give Tommy Norton a call and book some time at High Lonesome Sounds. That’s the nice thing about doing things your own way—you answer to yourself and no one else. If I want to hold off on pressing the CDs for my new album to add another song, I can. I can do any damn thing I want, so long as I keep true to myself and the music.
Maybe I’m never going to be the big star the little girl with the cardboard suitcase and guitar thought she’d be when she left the pine hills all those years ago and came looking for fame and fortune here in the big city. But maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe there’s other rewards, smaller ones, but more lasting. Like knowing my Aunt Hickory loves me and she told me I do her proud.
Shining Nowhere but in the Dark
If we look at the path, we do not see the sky.
—Native American saying
Because I could not stop for Death—
He kindly stopped for me—
—Emily Dickinson
1
“Spare change?”
The crowd eddies by on either side of me as I pause. It seems pointless, doling out a quarter here, a quarter there, as if twenty-five cents can make that much of a difference in anyone’s life, but I can’t stop myself from doing it, because it does make a difference. It means we’re at least paying attention to each other, acknowledging each other’s presence.
Come lunch time, some people buy lottery tickets, others waste their money on junk food. Me, I usually brown-bag it. Then after I’ve eaten, I go out for a walk, making sure I have a handful of change in the pocket of my jacket.
So I turn to the girl, my hand already in my pocket, fingers sorting through the coins by feel. She has a raggedy Gothic look about her, from her pale skin and the unruly tangle of her short dark hair to the way her clothes hang from her skinny frame. I find myself wondering, is this all she has to wear or a fashion statement? These days it’s hard to tell. Scuffed workboots, torn jeans, black T-shirt, black cotton jacket. She has so many earrings in one ear that I’m surprised her head doesn’t tilt in that direction. Her other lobe has only one small silver stud of an owl’s head. Except for her blood-red lipstick, she’s entirely monochrome.
She smiles as I drop a pair of quarters in her palm. “If this were a fairy tale,” she says, “you’d have just guaranteed yourself some unexpected help later on in the story.”
It’s such a charming and unexpected line, I have to return her smile. “But first I suppose I’d have to stand on one foot and call your name three times while hopping in a circle.”
“Something like that.”
“Except I don’t know your name.”
She grins. “It’s not supposed to be easy, is it? But maybe a random act of kindness is magic enough, in its own small way. Maybe I owe you now and I’ll have to come to you if ever you need my help.”
“That’s not why I gave you the money.”
“I know.” She touches my arm, her fingers weightless on my skin and soft as a feather. “Thanks.”
She pockets her fifty cents and turns away. “Spare change?” I hear as I start walking again.
Just before I fall asleep that night, I find myself thinking about fairy tales. I try to imagine myself in stories of old women and spoons that go adventuring and talking cats that repay a small kindness with a great kindness until I remember that I’m not a thirdborn child the way the central characters usually are in a fairy tale. That brings me wide awake again. Once upon a time I was the middle child; now I’m an orphan, without siblings. Thinking about family takes me to a place I try to never go, but it’s too late now.
I lie awake for hours, watching the slow shadow of the streetlight outside my window as it crawls across my ceiling. Fina
lly I get up and go to the window. I mean to pull the shade, but then I see someone standing out there on the street, under the streetlight, looking up at me.
He’s dark-eyed, dark-haired, that ravened thatch an unruly nest of untamed locks standing up at attention around his head; alabaster skin—brow, cheeks, throat, hands, even his lips. He has a face like a knife, all sharp angles, and there’s a Gothic look about him that reminds me of the girl panhandling earlier today. With him it’s reinforced by the old-fashioned cut of his clothes—Heathcliff come off the moor, not exactly the way Brontë described him, but the way I imagined him, a figure of shadow and pale skin that haunted my sleep for weeks. I used to live in delicious dread of his appearing at the foot of my bed and sweeping me up into his arms and away. Where, I was never exactly sure. Before I got the chance to figure out where I might like a man like that to take me, my life was irrevocably changed and I didn’t think about that kind of thing again for a very long time.
But that was over twenty years ago, when I was barely into my teens, and still had dreams. Right now I’m thirty-six, suffering from a familiar insomnia, and not at all happy to have acquired my very own stalker, no matter how handsome he might be. Bunching the open V of my nightgown closer to my throat with one hand, I step back, out of his line of sight, and sit down on the bed again. Safe, I think, only something makes me turn my head and that’s when I see the spare-change girl from earlier today, sitting on the other side of my bed like an invited guest.
“Don’t worry about him,” she says. “He won’t hurt you.”
My heartbeat goes into overdrive. I start to ask how she got in here, but the words stick in my throat and a half second later I realize that I have to be dreaming. My pulse is still drumming way too fast, but I don’t feel quite so nervous now. It’s funny. Maybe I don’t dream—or at least I don’t remember my dreams—and I certainly can’t remember ever knowing that I was dreaming while I was dreaming, but here I am, doing both. I wonder if I’ll retain any of this tomorrow morning.
“Do you know him?” I find myself asking.
“He’s my sister.”
“He?”
She laughs. “Oh, I guess that sounds pretty confusing, doesn’t it?”
Even for a dream, I think.
“We’re . . . wyrds,” she says. “Or at least that’s what they used to call us.”
“Weirds?”
I don’t realize until later that we’re using two entirely different words.
She nods. “Exactly. As in the fates. Sometimes we were called muses, too, though I doubt anyone would do that today. There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of interest in muses anymore.”
I give her a blank look. My hand goes to the night table and finds cigarettes, matches and ashtray. I have the usual twinge of regret as I light up, that familiar I-really-should-quit-one-of-these-days nag, but I ignore it. Dropping the cigarette package and matches on the bed between us, I take a long drag, then tip the grey end of my cigarette into the middle of the ashtray.
“These days,” she explains, “people don’t really care about using the muscles of their own imaginations. I mean, why bother when the media can provide every thought or idea you’ll ever need?”
“That’s a bit cynical.”
“But no less true.”
I shrug. “And it doesn’t explain what he’s doing down there—or why you’re in my bedroom, for that matter.”
Or, come to think of it, what she was doing out on the street at noon, cadging spare change.
“My sister being down there is my fault,” she says. “He saw me talking to you earlier today and when he realized that you don’t dream at all, he had to have a closer look.”
“I’m dreaming now.”
“Are you?”
I better be, I think, but decide to change the subject.
“So you’re fates,” I say.
She nods again. “There are three of us—like in the stories. They got that much right.”
I finally start to twig. “You mean like in the Greek myths?”
“Something like that.”
I’m thinking, there are three of them in the stories, one to spin the threads of our lives, one to weave them, and one to cut them when you’ve reached the end of your thread. Spin, weave, cut. Birth, life, death. I steal a glance out the window and Heathcliff’s still standing out there, looking up. He hasn’t got a hooded cloak or a scythe, but I’m pretty sure I know which one of the three he is now. Snip, snip.
My cigarette’s already at the filter. I stub it out and light another one. Even sucking smoke into my lungs the way I am, I can’t believe my time has come. I’m not ready, but then who is? I’ve always subscribed to Woody Allen’s philosophy: “I’m not afraid of dying,” he’s supposed to have said. “I just don’t want to be there when it happens.” Or I guess I just pretended I did. I feel guilty about being alive, but fear’s a bigger emotion. I’m afraid of dying. Not because it means my life’s over—what I’ve got is no big deal—but because of who I might meet when I do die and what they’ll say to me.
“And . . . your other sister?” I ask.
“She’s spinning.”
I nod because it makes sense. The spare-change girl sitting on the edge of my bed is too much a part of the here and now, too full of vitality not to be the weaver. Life. I take a drag from my cigarette and sneak another look at her older sister, waiting for me down there on the street.
“Why does she look like a man?” I ask, thinking maybe I can postpone the inevitable if I can just keep her talking.
The girl shrugs. “He got disbelieved into looking the way he does. That sort of thing happens to us when people stop dreaming their own dreams. And no dreams at all makes it even worse.”
I’m finding this way too confusing, even for a dream.
“Okay,” I tell her. “So your sister’s down there because I don’t dream.” I find that I don’t want to let on that I know why she’s really here—maybe because if I ignore it, it won’t be real. “Why are you here?”
“Because it’s my fault that he’s here right now and I didn’t want you to be upset. A lot of people find him unsettling.”
Maybe the strangest thing about all of this is the way she keeps referring to her sister as “he.”
“But sooner or later . . .” I begin.
“He would have come around to see you,” she says, finishing when I let my voice trail off. “It just takes time, getting to everyone. You probably wouldn’t have even known he was nearby, if you hadn’t seen me earlier today.”
One of the curses of fairyland, I think. Once you’ve had a glimpse of it, you can always see it, just there on the periphery of your vision. Or at least that’s the way it goes in some of the old stories. I played Good Samaritan with fifty cents, and the next thing I know I’ve got two of the Greek fates hanging around.
I’ve finished my second cigarette even quicker than the first. I stub it out and light yet another one. I don’t want to hold on to what she’s telling me, but I can’t let it go. Death’s down there on the street, his gaze meeting mine every time I look out the window. Eternity seems to linger in his eyes and I can’t read him at all. Is he bored, sad, amused?
“If he’s busy,” I say, turning back to the girl. “I can wait. Really. I’m in no hurry.”
“That’s not the way it works,” she tells me. “Everybody has to dream, just as one day, everybody has to die.”
2
Jenny Wray woke in a cold sweat. She sat up and stared frantically at the side of her bed, but of course there was no one there. She leaned forward so that she could see out the window and there was no one standing under the streetlight either. She started to reach for the cigarettes on her night table, then remembered that she’d given them up over ten years ago.
God, it had seemed so real. Death below, his younger sister in the room with her. The taste of the cigarette.
She sat up against the headboard, arms wrapped around her knees,
reliving memories that had no business hanging on for so long, no business still being so clear. It was a long time before she could even think of trying to get back to sleep. Her visitors had been wrong about one thing, she thought as she stretched out once more.
“See,” she murmured into her pillow. “I do dream.”
Because what else could it have been?
“When we visit, we come like a dream,” she heard someone reply. “But it’s not the same. It’s not the same thing at all.”
She recognized the voice. It was the spare-change girl. She could picture her face without having to open her eyes, could imagine Death having joined her, standing at the foot of the bed now in all his Gothic trappings.
The idea of dreaming about them still being in the room with her gave her the creeps. Maybe if she pretended they weren’t there, they’d simply go away. The skin prickled up and down her spine at the thought of their presence until she stole a glance through her eyelashes and saw she really was alone. When she finally drifted off, she wasn’t sure if she was falling asleep, or dreaming she was falling asleep. The difference seemed important, but she was too tired to try to make sense of it now.
3
The dream wouldn’t go away.
It followed Jenny through the day, clinging to the wool of her thoughts like a persistent burr until she knew she had to talk to someone about it. The trouble was, who? She was temping these days, only her second day at this particular office, so she couldn’t approach one of her coworkers, and it wasn’t the sort of topic that normally came up in conversations among her own small circle of acquaintances; she didn’t have any real friends. It wasn’t until she was leaving the office that she thought of someone who wouldn’t think she was weird or laugh her off. So instead of taking the bus home, she caught a subway downtown.
It took her a little while to find the shop she was looking for. When she finally did and went inside, she stood in the doorway, momentarily distracted. The air in the shop was several shades darker than outside and redolent with the scent of incense. There were packets of herbs for sale and bins of candles; crystals displayed on swatches of dark velvet along with ornately-designed daggers and goblets; ceremonial hooded cloaks hanging along one wall and books crammed on shelves, many with the word magic or magick in the title, as well as any number of items that Jenny couldn’t identify, or if she recognized the item, didn’t know the use to which it would be put, presented as it was in this context.