But at the same time she was filled with a giddy exhilaration, a kind of heady, senseless good humor that stretched a grin on her lips and made her feel that everything she looked at she was seeing for the first time. The art hanging from the walls was vibrant, the colors almost pulsing. The spiraling grain in the room’s wooden trim, window frames, and wainscotting pulled at her gaze, drawing it down into its twists and turns. The smell of the turps and solvents from her studio behind her had never had such a presence and bite before. It wasn’t so much unpleasant as so very immediate.
This, she realized suddenly, was what Jilly meant when she talked about the epiphany of experiencing magic, howsoever small a piece of the mystery you stumbled upon. It redefined everything. It wasn’t a scary thing, in and of itself; it only felt scary at first because it was so surprising.
She smiled. That’s who she could call, she thought. She laid her pencil down and reached for the phone, but before she could dial, she heard the front door open and someone stamping their feet in the hall. When she looked up, it was to find Jilly standing in the doorway. Jilly gave her a wave, then shook the snow from her tangled hair, brushed it from her parka.
“Oh, good,” she said, removing her mittens. “You are open. I wasn’t sure when I saw the closed sign in the window, but I could see that the steps had been swept so I thought I’d give it a try anyway.”
Eliza blinked in surprise. “I can’t believe you’re here.”
“Oh, come on. The weather’s not that bad. In fact, I rather like this kind of a snowfall. Pooh on the winter grinches, I say.”
“No, I mean I was just about to call you.”
“With the most tremendous good news, I hope.”
“Well, I . . .”
But by that point Jilly was standing by the counter and looking down at Eliza’s sketches. Her eyes, already a startling blue, sparkled even brighter with merriment.
“Pennymen!” she said. “Oh, aren’t they just the best?”
“You know what he is?”
Jilly gave her a puzzled look. “You don’t? But they’re your drawings.”
“No. I mean, they are, but I’ve never heard of a pennyman before. I just thought . . . I just saw one a few moments ago . . . out in the hall . . . and . . .”
Her voice trailed off.
Jilly smiled. “And now you don’t know what to make of it at all.”
You didn’t have to spend much time with Jilly for the conversation to turn to things not quite of this world. She claimed an intimate knowledge with the curious magical beings that populated many of her paintings, a point of view that frustrated die-hard realists such as Sarah at the same time as it enchanted those like Eliza who would love to believe, couldn’t quite, but definitely leaned in that direction under the spell of Jilly’s stories and firm belief. Or at least Eliza did so for the duration of the story.
“I guess that’s pretty much it,” Eliza admitted.
Jilly took off her parka and dropped it on the floor, then settled down in the extra chair that they kept behind the counter for visitors.
“Well,” she said, “pennymen are very lucky. Christy wrote about them in one of his books.”
She cocked an eyebrow, but Eliza had to shake her head. Christy Riddell was a friend of Jilly’s, a local author considered to be quite the expert on urban folklore and myths. Eliza had lost count of how many books he’d written.
“I guess I haven’t read that one,” she said.
Jilly nodded. “Who can keep up with the man?” She scrunched her brow for a moment, thinking, then went on. “Anyway, the pennymen are all tied up with penny folklore. They start their lives in the branches of the penny trees.”
Eliza gave her a blank look.
“Which is another name for trembling aspens,” Jilly told her.
“Their leaves do look like coins,” Eliza said. “The way they move in a breeze.”
“Exactly. Except the pennymen are a coppery color—skin, hair, clothes, and all—and sort of turtlelike, since they can draw in their limbs and head and lie flat on the ground, looking exactly like a coin. Seeing one is like picking up the penny for luck. When they live in your house, they project a . . . I suppose you could call it an aura that promotes thriftiness and honesty.”
Eliza smiled. “As in pennywise?”
“You’ve got it. And then there’s that business with ‘a penny for your thoughts.’ Supposedly, every time that’s offered, the pennymen acquire those thoughts and add them to what Christy calls ‘the long memory’—the history of a people, or a family, or a city, or a social circle; a kind of connective stream of thoughts and memories that define the collective. A non-monetary wealth of song and poetry, stories and gossip, that we can access through dreams.”
“Really?”
Jilly shrugged. “That’s what Christy says—though they have to take a liking to you first. The problem is, they can also be mischievous little buggers if they decide you need to be taken down a notch or two. Not malicious, but definitely . . .” She looked for the word she wanted. “Vexing.”
“But they’re so small—what could they do?”
“Being small doesn’t necessarily mean they can’t be a bother. They can be very good at hiding your keys, or the pen you were sure you put down, right there, just a moment ago. Maybe they’ll switch all the auto-dial numbers on your phone. Or wet your postage stamps so they’re all stuck together when you go to use them. Little things.”
Jilly looked down at Eliza’s sketches again.
“I’ve never seen one myself,” she said, “but you’ve drawn them exactly the way I imagined they’d look from Christy’s descriptions.”
“So what does it mean—my seeing one the way I did?”
Jilly laughed. “Mostly, it doesn’t mean anything. It just is. It’s like seeing a murder of crows, or a particularly wonderful sunset—you just appreciate the experience for what it is. The beauty of it. And the wonder. And how it can make you smile.”
“But everything feels so different now,” Eliza said. “It’s like . . . I don’t know. It’s like I feel as though anything can happen now.”
“And somewhere, it probably does.”
“You know what I mean.”
Jilly nodded. “Let me see if I can remember how Christy first explained it to me. What’s happened is that you’ve now cracked open a door in the wall set up by the rational part of your brain—the part that makes it easier for us to function in what everybody perceives as the regular, logical world—and your own logic is struggling to shut it while the part of you that leans toward whimsy and wonder wants to push it as wide open as it can go. You have to learn to balance the two, though most people end up simply shutting the door again and not even remembering that it’s there. They’re not even aware that they’re doing it; it’s simple self-preservation because living with the door open, or simply ajar, can be very confusing.”
“I’ll say.”
“But not necessarily a bad thing.”
Eliza sighed. “Unless you’re Sarah.”
“There’s that,” Jilly agreed sympathetically.
5
There’s something different about the boy when she comes home that night, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. She’s wearing a glow, but that could just be the weather. She loves the kind of snowfall we’ve had today. Some people get grumpy during a Newford winter; the boy only gets more cheerful. It’s in the summer that she wilts.
I’ve finally gotten out of bed and made up for my earlier laziness by tidying the apartment and putting together dinner—a chicken curry, with nan and a yogurt-cucumber salad on the side. We have dinner and later we watch a video, a remake of Sabrina that I decide was much better in the original with Hepburn and Bogey, but the boy likes it.
Later, when I stop by the door of her bedroom to say goodnight, I find her looking at sketches of little round cartoon men that it turns out she did at the gallery earlier today. I’m surprised to see them because she u
sually works in a much more realistic mode, like the project she’s been working on for the past few months, a series of landscapes, the connective thread being that each has a ladder in it. You don’t always spot it right away, but it’s there. The nice thing about the paintings is that the inclusion of the ladder is never forced. Odd, sometimes. Even a little startling. But never forced.
These drawings . . . they’re more along the lines of what Jilly does. Fatbellied miniature men—I know they’re tiny because of the size references she’s included in a couple of the drawings. A running shoe in one. Tubes of oil paint in another. They’re fun—whimsical—and I find myself wondering if she’s taken on a commission for a poster or something. Or maybe she’s decided to develop a comic strip. There’re worse things than having your work syndicated in hundreds of morning papers.
“What are these?” I ask.
“Pennymen,” she tells me. “Coins that turn into little people when they think we’re not looking.”
I see the connection now. Lose the little heads and skinny limbs and they’d look just like pennies. In fact, there are coins in a couple of the sketches, which must be the pennymen at rest.
“Cute,” I say.
She shrugs and bundles the sketches together, tosses them onto her desk. I wonder again why she’s drawing them, but she doesn’t say, and I don’t ask. I get that funny feeling again—like I did when she first came home—that there’s something different, something changed, only then she smiles and says goodnight, and I stop worrying about it.
But in the days that follow, I find myself thinking about it again because the boy seems to have developed a few odd mannerisms. Sometimes I see her sitting with her head cocked, listening, when there’s nothing to hear. Or she’ll turn quickly, as though she caught movement from the corner of her eye, but there’re only the two of us in the room.
There’s something familiar about all of this, but I don’t place the familiarity immediately. Then one day it hits me.
She reminds me of my mother—my mother and her invisible companions—and my heart sinks.
6
It was two weeks before Eliza caught another glimpse of a pennyman. She was sitting in her studio, working on a canvas, when from the corner of her eye, she saw the slow, careful movement along the baseboard. As soon as she turned toward him, the little man dropped to the ground and there was only what appeared to be a penny lying there on the floor.
Eliza put her brush down and stepped around her easel. The pennyman remained motionless as she approached it. She knelt down for a closer look and cleared her throat. Feeling a little self-conscious, she addressed the coin.
“You don’t have to be afraid,” she said. “I would never hurt you. Honestly.”
Not surprisingly, the copper penny made no reply. She didn’t even get a small head poking its way turtlelike out of the body to look back at her. What response she did get came from the doorway to the gallery where Sarah was now standing, a puzzled look on her face.
“Eliza,” she said. “Who are you talking to?”
“The pennyman,” Eliza said, without thinking.
She’d looked over at Sarah, then back at where the pennyman had turned into a coin, but neither penny nor little man were there now.
“The pennyman,” Sarah repeated.
Slowly Eliza returned her attention to her roommate.
“It’s not like what you think,” she told Sarah.
“How’s that?”
You don’t have to be afraid, Eliza wanted to say. I’m not going crazy like your mother did.
But of course she couldn’t.
“They’re real,” Eliza said instead. “I didn’t make them up.”
Sarah nodded and Eliza watched her roommate’s features close up, could feel the distance grow between them.
“Of course you didn’t,” Sarah said.
She turned away and went back into the gallery. Eliza gave the empty stretch of wooden floor a last scrutinizing look, then rose from where she’d been kneeling.
“Sarah!” she called.
Sarah reappeared in the doorway.
“Don’t,” she said, before Eliza could speak. “Don’t make it worse.”
“But there really are pennymen. I’ve seen them. It’s true.”
Sarah shook her head. “No, it’s only true for you.”
7
I know I’m being a lousy friend. I should be more sympathetic, but the boy should know that this is the last thing in the world I can deal with. I can’t ever go through this again. It’s not like she doesn’t know. It’s not like we haven’t talked it out a hundred times before—the separate sorrows that we each had to carry and deal with on our own until that day we met. My mother and the boy’s fiancé.
She got left at the altar, which is weird enough, except he was the one who wanted to get married so badly, he wanted the huge wedding, he’s the one who blew it all up way out of proportion so that when he abandoned her in the church, the embarrassment and lack of self-worth she felt was exaggerated all out of proportion as well. And somehow the whole sorry mess became her fault. Her family blamed her. His family blamed her. She became the pariah in their circle of friends, none of whom would stand by her when she needed them, not even those who’d been her friends before she’d met him.
We helped each other. We made each other. Being an artist was something she’d only ever dreamed of before; I’m the one who stood by her and convinced her to make it a reality. I don’t say this to make it seem like I should be getting some kind of a medal for perseverance and support above and beyond the call of duty, because she went through just as much for me. She’s the one who finally made me believe I could be a normal functioning human being myself, that my mother’s genes weren’t going to tune me into broadcasts from loopyville and everything that would subsequently entail.
Except now she’s the one who’s gone all X Files on me. The truth isn’t out there; it’s on TV and it’s not truth at all, it’s just tabloid stories brought to life by writers trying to make a buck. The truth is we can’t buy into the paranormal because it undermines everything that grounds us, that lets us function in the real world. And never forget, whatever little fairy-tale encounters we think we’ve had, whatever mysterious voices we hear whispering in our ears, or lights we see in the sky that can’t be explained, at some point, we all have to return to the real world.
I guess the worst thing is that now there’s a part of the boy that I don’t recognize anymore. Now there’s a whole side to her that’s stopped making sense and that scares me. Because if part of her can become a stranger, what’s to stop the rest of her from doing the same?
She could become anyone. She could have been anyone all along and I was just kidding myself that we knew each other. I find myself needing to ask, is this how we spend our lives—imagining each other? Because you can never really know what another person’s thinking or feeling, can you? And just because they’re thinking or feeling one thing at one time, what’s to stop them from changing their minds about it?
Someone once told me never to fall in love with a place or a person because they’re only on loan. What kind of a way is that to live? I thought when I first heard that. But now I understand a little better. It’s because what you fall in love with doesn’t last. Everything changes. Sometimes you can grow with it, but sometimes you just grow apart instead.
Earlier I said that magic belongs in stories and that the real world isn’t a story. Not that kind, anyway.
I still believe that. Only now I wish I didn’t.
8
Jilly found Eliza sitting in the window booth of The Dear Mouse Diner on Lee Street, nursing a cup of coffee that had long since gone cold. Outside, the snow had turned to freezing rain, making the footing more than a little slippery. Jilly was on her way home from an evening course she was teaching at the Newford School of Art and had almost taken a fall more than once before spying Eliza in the window and deciding to come in to join her. br />
“Hey, you,” she said, sliding into the booth across from Eliza.
Eliza looked up and nodded hello. “Hey, yourself.”
Jilly leaned over the table and peered into Eliza’s cup. Her cold coffee looked about as appealing as old bathwater, complete with a dark ring at surface level crusted on the white china.
“You want a refill?” she asked.
Eliza shrugged, which Jilly took to mean yes. She brought the cup over to the counter and returned with a fresh one for each of them. They were busy for a moment, opening creamers and sugar packets, stirring the contents into their cups. Then Eliza sighed and looked out the window again.
“I feel this is all my fault,” Jilly said.
Eliza looked back at her. “Don’t. I’m the one who saw what Sarah can’t handle as being real.”
“But if I hadn’t talked them up to you . . .”
Eliza shook her head. “It still wouldn’t change my having seen the pennymen. I didn’t mean to ever say that I believed they were real. Not to her. I mean, of all people, I know how she feels about that kind of thing. But she caught me off guard and it kind of slipped out and then, well, I wasn’t about to start lying to her. That’s just not something we’d do to each other.”
“Of course not.”
“Lying by omission was bad enough.”
Jilly nodded. “So what’s she doing now?”
“I’m not sure. I know she’s staying at the Y, but she hasn’t been back to the gallery in a week and she won’t talk to me at all.”
“I don’t understand. Was it that bad with her mother?”