The Onion Girl

by Charles de Lint

  But that’s not the way I’m built, I guess. I stopped running away from trouble a long time ago, Joe’s comments notwithstanding. I know I’ve got to deal with the difficulties I’ve got here before doing any serious traveling in the dreamlands. The problem is, beyond dealing with the physical ailments that have turned me into the Broken Girl, I don’t know what else I can do. I thought I’d already come to terms with what happened to me as a kid. I can’t change what happened to me. And I’ve spent a lifetime doing what I can to make sure it doesn’t happen to other kids.

  But I guess that’s not enough.

  I try to move my paralyzed arm. My leg. I try to just feel something there. Anything. If my inner hurt has to be cured first, I’m going to be stuck like this forever.

  Great. Now I’m even more depressed.

  I wonder if I can sleep without crossing over, because any time I spend there is only going to tempt me to spend more. I’ll have to ask Sophie how that works when she comes by tomorrow.

  For now, I don’t fight it. I close my eyes, but instead of drifting off, the paintings come. I see them floating in my mind’s eye, all those faerie paintings that Wendy told me somebody trashed. My gemmin and subway goblins, junkyard fairies and gargoyles, moving from their high stone perches.

  I open my eyes but the room’s a smeared blur from my tears.

  And then I start to see paintings I haven’t done yet. Toby and Jolene, for starters. That sweet image of Wendy and me as flying animals.

  I don’t have Isabelle’s gift. I can’t make numena from my paintings—those spirits that her art calls over from somewhere else and clothes with bodies that can move and interact with people in the World As It Is so long as their paintings remain intact. It’s like she opens a door between the worlds with the way she uses her pigment. But something is still born from my work. It might not literally bring spirits to life like Isabelle’s paintings can, but it still does something. If nothing else, it reminds people that everything has a spirit, even an empty lot or a trashed car. Or maybe it reminds them of what it was like to see the world as a kid, which isn’t such a bad thing either. We could stand a little more wide-eyed innocence in the world.

  I live and breathe art. I can’t imagine not being able to do it. Where other people write in journals to mark the passages of their lives, I use my sketchbooks. When you flip through them you don’t get a sense of story the way you do with Mona’s comics. Two of her strips, “My Life As a Bird” and the shorter “Spunky Girl” that runs every week in In the City, are literally a day-to-day commentary on what happens in her life.

  But the stories in my sketchbooks are there for me to see. I can look at a page and call back exactly where I was when I did it, what I was thinking, what I was feeling, what was going on in my life. I started keeping a sketchbook when I was in university and until this hospital stay, there hasn’t been a day gone by that I didn’t draw something in whatever one was currently on the go.

  That’s gone now. It’s all gone. Art can’t be a journey for me anymore. It can only be something that other people do, a journey they take, and all I can do is watch them go. See what they bring back.

  I’m weeping in earnest now. I can’t stop. I can’t even blow my nose. I start to choke on the buildup of phlegm, but I’m too embarrassed to call for a nurse. I manage to turn my head and cough the mucus out onto the pillow beside me. It oozes down my neck, onto my shoulder. But that doesn’t help. I still feel like I’m choking.

  Finally, I bury my pride and push the call button for a nurse.

  I just can’t stop crying.

  Joe Crazy Dog

  MANIDÒ-AKÌ, 1999

  There are no maps in the spiritworld. When the Great Spirit decided to make manidò-akì, I guess she wasn’t thinking about us needing to find anything specific in here. What she gave us was just a patchwork quilt of spirit lands and dreamlands and the manidò-tewin, the spirit homes of everything that lives or ever has lived in the World As It Is: animal, vegetable, mineral; waterway, landscape, building. Everything’s got its own manidò-tewin here. Some people call them abinàs-odey, a heart home, your own piece of the quilt that’s as familiar to you as your own heartbeat, the one place that’s always going to be yours.

  But the deeper you go, the wilder and more unpredictable the landscape becomes. Go far enough and it’s like you’re on some other planet where the natural laws all run counter to everything you know.

  Places like Sophie’s Mabon, the minutes tick away pretty much at the same rate they do in the World As It Is. Connecting these kinds of regions is a spiderweb of paths that stick to the same timeline that the two worlds can share. Work at it and you can also find other, secret roads where the hours stand still, or fold back in on themselves so that no time passes from when you step on the trail to when you get off again. There’s places like that, too, small acres and whole territories, even. The Greatwood—that echo of the first forest where Jilly’s been spending so much of her dreaming time—is one of them. But stray beyond those trails and timeless regions, and you don’t know what you’ll find.

  Mostly it’s quicklands, places where time runs faster than it does in the World As It Is. You can spend a year there and only minutes pass by in the world you’ve left behind. But there are tracts of slowtime, too. Stay overnight in one of them and you could come back like Rip Van Winkle to find that a hundred years have gone by. Not a good idea if you’ve left anything you care about back in the World As It Is.

  People like me, we can smell the difference. I stay out of the slowtime pockets because there’s too much I like waiting for me in the world I leave behind. If I’ve got to move through the wild, I try to go by the quicklands. With my blood, I’ve got the time to spare. I’m not immortal, but we’re a long-lived people. It’s in the blood, but it’s also a side effect of spending time in this place. Something in the air, I guess.

  But though time can stand still, or even run backward in manidò-akì, it just keeps marching on in the World As It Is. So when I leave Jilly in the Greatwood, I stick to the secret roads, covering as much ground as I can in an ever-widening spiral. I’m hoping for a quick end to this. I don’t expect to just run into the woman I’m looking for, but if I’m lucky, I’ll hear some gossip, catch a whiff of news that’ll lead me to her.

  I’m not lucky.

  I don’t want to brag, but I’m good at this, navigating manidò-akì, finding people, places, things. Some of us just have a knack for it and I’ve been doing it for a long time. But it can take patience, and time, and I’m running out of time so far as Jilly’s concerned. The way she’s feeling these days, she’s liable to just cut the thread, thinking she’s going full-time into the dreamlands, but all she’ll be doing is finishing this lifetime and moving on to what comes next.

  So after a couple of days of this, I take myself back to the World As It Is to get some guidance. I can read the bones, but I can’t throw them for myself—they’re like any augury system; they just don’t work as well when you use them for yourself. I need someone else to do a reading for me.

  Cassie looks up and smiles when I step out of the bedroom of our apartment. Time was, and not so long ago, we just made do with squats. We were nomads, living half in this world, half in manidò-akì. Everything we owned we could carry on our backs. We’d camp out in the dreamlands, find ourselves an abandoned building to squat in whenever we got back to the city.

  But Cassie’s been getting the nesting instinct lately. She wants babies. She wants a cabin in the hills, a bottle tree out front to scare off the witches and welcome the spirits, just like the tree the old woman had—the one who gave her the cards. I’ll make sure it happens, just like I make sure she spends time in the spiritworld to stretch out the years she’s been allotted for this lifetime. For now we make do with a basement apartment in the north end of Upper Foxville, but it’s already filled up with more things than we could fit in the back of a pickup truck. Mind you, we don’t have any kind of a vehicle either.


  “Hey, stranger,” she says and comes over to give me a hug. “I’ve missed you.”

  “I’ve missed you, too.”

  How could I not? There’s a comfort and love in these arms that I won’t ever find anywhere else, not in this world or any other. I was never much for believing in soul mates until I met her.

  She still looks to be in her mid-thirties, a dark-eyed, beautiful woman with coffee-colored skin and hair that hangs in a hundred little beaded braids. Always one for the subtle colors, tonight she’s wearing a pair of purple sweatpants and a hot-pink T-shirt. Her sneakers are bright yellow. That’s my Cassie, always blends into a crowd.

  “So did you have any luck finding your grandmother?” she asks.

  Nokomis isn’t my grandmother. It’s just what the People call her. But I don’t bother correcting Cassie.

  “Not yet,” I say. “That’s why I need your help.”

  “I’ll get the cards,” she tells me.

  They don’t look like much, these cards of hers that were handed down to her by that old black woman in the cabin with the bottle tree. Cassie’s got other, fancy Tarot cards that she uses for regular readings, like when we’re out on the streets doing our fortune-telling shtick. These are different. Battered cards with a blue floral pattern on the backs, held together with a rubber band, face sides all blank.

  We sit down on either side of the coffee table. Cassie pulls the elastic off. She fans the cards out and offers them to me, face side down. I know the drill. I let my need fill me. I attune myself to it and the spirit that fills the room—mine, Cassie’s, the one that flows between us. Then I take three of the cards, one at a time.

  The first card’s blank face starts to shimmer and an image appears, showing a dog with a coyote shape to its body, its mottled fur a half-dozen shades of brown and muted red and ocher. It’s got a crow’s head and seems to be trotting through the bush down some game trail.

  “Me, I guess,” I say.

  “You recognize where you are?” Cassie asks.

  I shake my head. “Probably manidò-akì.”

  “Past or present?”

  “No difference, really,” I say with a short laugh. “I’ve been there and I’ll be going back. What I’m looking for is some guidance on where to go.”

  Cassie nods and we study the second card. The image taking shape there shows a pack of wolves worrying at what looks like the flank of a white horse. All we can see is the dead animal’s hindquarters. There are crows and ravens nearby, waiting their turn.

  I look up at Cassie. “Any ideas?”

  “Cousins?” she asks. “Maybe they can direct you?”

  “And the horse?”

  She shakes her head. “It might not mean anything beyond the fact that the ones that can help you will have just made a kill. You know how literal the images can be.”

  “I suppose.”

  I get a bad feeling from that card, but nothing I can put my finger on. Maybe it’s just the dog in me. Horses and dogs, we’ve both been partners to humans, which kind of makes us kin to each other as well. Doesn’t feel right, feeding on kin.

  I study that second card for a moment longer, then turn my attention to the third one. The image on this card shows a full moon, reflected in the dark water of a seep-fed pool that’s high on some mountaintop in red rock country. As I study the image, I can see time passing on the lower slopes, the seasons flowing one into the other. There’s only one place I’ve ever seen them do that.

  “That’s in the quicklands,” I say.

  “And the reflection of the moon?”

  “You don’t get more earthbound than Nokomis, but she always did have a fondness for lunar imagery. Her contact with the Grandfather Thunders, I guess.”

  Cassie straightens up and looks at me across the table.

  “Does this help at all?” she asks.

  “Indirectly. I thought she’d be deep in the wild. This just confirms it.”

  “You know the cards,” Cassie says. “They expect you to help yourself as much as they help you.” She picks up the cards, shuffles them, just the three. “We could try again.”

  “No,” I say. “I can tell this is about as clear as it’s going to get. Looks like I’ve got some hard traveling ahead of me. The quicklands pretty much go on forever.”

  Cassie returns the cards to the deck and wraps the rubber band around them again. I enjoy watching the quick, easy movement of her fingers.

  “This could take some time,” I add. “Sure you won’t come with me?”

  She shakes her head. “I’m filling in with Laura at the hospice. They’re still short-staffed.”

  “I thought you’d gotten some new volunteers.”

  “We did, but they’re too sick to do much, and everybody else seems to think they’re going to catch the disease by working there.”

  “Idiots.”

  “Mmm. You want me to pack you some food?”

  I look at her sitting there across the table. I don’t know how long I’ll be gone, but any amount of time is too long.

  “Thought I’d wait until the morning to leave,” I say.

  A slow smile builds on her lips, then spreads across her face. She doesn’t say a word. Just takes me by the hand and leads me into the bedroom.

  In the morning, I’ve got frybread, beans, and a pair of big mugs of coffee ready by the time Cassie comes wandering in from out of the bedroom. She rubs the sleep from her eyes and gives the coffee an approving look.

  “This is why I keep you,” she tells me.

  “And here I thought it was for my superior dancing skills.”

  “You are a good dancer, actually.”

  “Ya-ha-hey,” I tell her and dance a plate of breakfast over to the table for her.

  She’s wearing an oversized, tie-dyed T-shirt as a nightie this morning that’s so bright it makes my eyes water. When I blink, I see beadwork patterns instead of stars. Cassie takes an appreciative sip of her coffee, then looks at me over the rim.

  “Did Jilly say anything about her paintings when you were talking to her?” she asks.

  “Nothing specific. I know it’s driving her crazy that she can’t even pick up a pencil where she is in the hospital.”

  “Somebody broke into her studio and destroyed all her faerie paintings.”

  My worry for Jilly goes up a couple of notches. Something like that might be all she needs to send her off into the dreamlands for good.

  “How’s she taking it?” I ask.

  “No one’s told her yet.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Maybe, maybe not,” Cassie says. “I think she should know. It’ll hurt, but knowing the truth is always better in the long run. And it might harden her resolve to get serious about healing herself.”

  “If it doesn’t drive her deeper into manidò-akì.”

  “I think she’s stronger than that.”

  I give a slow nod. “I hope you’re right.”

  “But there was something funny in her studio,” Cassie goes on. “I got the key from Sophie and had a look around before I came home last night. You know, to see if I could pick up any sign the vandals might have left behind.”

  Cassie’s a sensitive as well as a card reader. When she talks about sign, she’s talking about spirit traces that most people would never feel. She can read people and places better than most of the cousins I know.

  “What did you find?” I ask.

  Cassie doesn’t answer immediately. I know she’s going back to the studio in her head, looking for the right words to explain what she’d felt when she was there.

  “You know there’s that brightness in Jilly,” she says finally.

  “Like a star sometimes,” I say, “and I still don’t know what it is. The glow of a big spirit, I’m guessing. Big and strong.”

  Cassie nods. “Whoever trashed her paintings was just as strong, but instead of a brightness she—I’m pretty sure it was a she—has a dark light burning in her. But the
weird thing is that the sign she left behind could have been left by Jilly.”

  “But dark instead of bright.”

  “If that makes any sense.”

  “So what’re you saying?” I ask, though I can already see where this is going.

  Cassie hesitates before she answers. Moves her coffee mug around in a circle on the table.

  “It’s like Jilly trashed the paintings herself,” she finally says.

  “Except she was in the hospital, right? I mean, the time frame—”

  “No, Lou says it happened when she was still in the coma.” Cassie’s gaze lifts from the table and settles on me. “Could her spirit have come back out of the dreamlands and done it? I mean, without her even knowing it?”

  “When it comes to manidò-akì,” I say, “anything’s possible. They don’t call it the Changing Lands for nothing. But that’d make no sense. Why would she do it?”

  “I don’t know,” Cassie says. “But the sooner you find this grandmother of yours, the better it’ll be.”

  I don’t like the idea of leaving this behind, unsettled. Because thinking on what Cassie’s told me, it sounds too much like a shadow twin, the cast-off bits of a person that, in the right set of circumstances, can take on a personality of its own. My people have too many stories about these shadow twins and the trouble that can follow them. It’s like a dark wind fills them and they’re liable to do anything. Mostly, they turn on the ones that cast them in the first place.

  But I know Cassie’s right. I can’t worry on that right now. Best thing I can do is find Nokomis and see if she can help.

  We finish our breakfast. I pack some of the frybread, grab a fat pouch of tobacco and a couple of packages of rolling papers from the cupboard. There’s time for one long soul kiss with Cassie, and then I’m gone.