The Onion Girl

by Charles de Lint

  But she ain’t here, and I guess it’s a good thing or I’d be sharing a cell with Pinky in the pen.

  I take a breath, steady myself. Look closer. She’s older and she’s gone and changed her name, but I know her. The Carter blood ain’t hard to miss. Hell, I could be looking in a mirror ’stead of some picture in a magazine.

  The article’s not long. It ain’t even just ’bout her. It’s ’bout the art scene back in Newford and it talks ’bout a whole mess of these up-and-comers they got making waves there, and how their work relates to that of the more established artists like my sister. There’s other pictures, too, of some of the other artists, but all I see is the one of her, these damn fairy paintings hanging on a wall in back of her.

  I can’t explain my reaction, not in no way that’d make sense to anybody but me.

  It’s like this black hole inside me suddenly filled up with something even darker.

  I guess what I had me right then was what the preachers back home’d call an epiphany. I realized how all the crap in my life could be laid at her feet. The road that brought me here, that’s made my life what it is, that let Hector die and put Pinky in prison, it all started the day she walked outta my life and left me to fend for myself. A little girl, dropped straight into hell with no never you mind.

  I don’t know how long I’m standing there like that, but then I realize the customer’s looking at me like maybe I sprouted me an extra tit or something. I turn to the pages I was looking for and do the copies for him, but afore I give him that magazine back, I make me a copy of that article, too.

  He leaves, shortchanging me, and I don’t even notice at first, and when I do, I don’t care. All of this, it’s got me thinking. What, I don’t rightly know. But I figure there’s got to be some justice in this world. None that nobody’d ever give me, mind—hell, I ain’t stupid. The world don’t work like that. But maybe there’s some justice I can take for my own self. Some way I can grab hold of that power I feel in me when I’m dreaming, bottle it up and bring it back here with me.

  And then, look out.

  It’s the ass end of winter, February 1999, the day Pinky finally gets released from prison. We had us a slate-gray sky that morning that put me in mind of winter in Tyson, but it weren’t nowheres near as cold. I kinda got to missing that cold my own self, the change of seasons and all. Gives you a sense of time moving, sets you in your place. Here it’s sixty degrees and sunny, there’s no snow, and the plum trees and acacias are all in bloom. It ain’t my idea of winter.

  Pinky coulda got out earlier, but she wasn’t gonna take no parole and be beholding to anyone. She just did her time, paid her debt to society. I figure now it’s time for society to pay something back to us, but I ain’t quite figured exactly what yet.

  I took most of the money I’d been saving over the years Pinky was in prison and I bought us a vintage Caddy convertible and had it painted pink. So you can guess who particularly appreciated that gesture when I showed up at the prison gates to pick her up. She stood there looking at that long cool stretch of candy-floss car and she couldn’t stop grinning.

  “Raylene Carter,” she says, “where in hell did you get this beauty of a machine? I sure hope to hell you ain’t stole’ it or nothin’.”

  “No, ma’am,” I tell her, grinning right back. “Hector bought this for us.”

  In a way it was true. All them little five- and ten-dollar checks add up to something over the years, you collect enough of them and stash ’em away, ’stead of spending it all.

  Pinky looks like she’s got something to say—’bout Hector, I guess, and his being dead all these years—but then she just shrugs, tosses her bag in the backseat where it joins a couple of suitcases and the case with my notebook computer in it. The trunk’s filled with the rest of our stuff that I thought was worth keeping. There weren’t all that much. Everything else I just chucked out.

  Pinky slides in on the passenger side. She lights up a smoke.

  “So where we goin’?” she asks.

  “We’re going home,” I tell her.

  “’Bout time,” she says.

  She’s giving the prison walls the finger when I pull out a the parking lot. The freeways are bumper to bumper like they always are, but neither of us much give a damn. I got a few thousand left over after buying the Caddy and the paint job, so we can travel in style. It don’t much matter if we go fast or slow, ’cause we’re together now, like we’re supposed to be, and we’re heading home.

  Jilly

  NEWFORD, MAY 1999

  They moved me into rehab at the end of April. It’s a smaller, older building, west of the main hospital complex. The view isn’t as spectacular as it was from my window on the ward, but I’m on the first floor and my window looks out onto a kind of park. The beds of tulips and all the green of the lawns and the budding trees out there do wonders for my spirit. When I’m not in therapy, I get them to put me in my wheelchair and roll me over to the window so that I can look out and paint pictures in my head.

  I’ve been here for a couple of weeks now, keeping my promise to Joe and doing everything they tell me to do, building my strength, exercising, and trying not to get too discouraged. But it’s hard. The improvements, if you can call them that, are so minuscule that they’re hardly worth mentioning.

  I still get headaches—along with the paralysis, they’re a leftover of my concussion—but my hair’s starting to grow back where they had to shave it. I’ve got a little field of dark stubble growing up beside the tangled forest on the rest of my head. The bruises and swelling on the left side of my face are all gone. I’ve still got casts on my right leg and left arm, but they’re going to remove the plaster one from my arm in a week or so because the bones are healing so well.

  When I was a kid, I was kind of ambidextrous. I preferred writing and drawing with my left hand, but I threw a ball and automatically used a fork or spoon with my right. In school they made me do everything with my right hand and I went along with them to fit in and because it wasn’t super hard for me. But I wish now I hadn’t. If I’d used my left hand all along, I could be drawing again in a week or so. I guess I’ll just have to teach myself how to do it.

  My right side is still paralyzed but I’ve got feeling again in my face. I hated the numbness. It was like the freezing from a visit to a dentist’s office, only it never wore off. But the muscles are starting to work properly now so I don’t have that slack look on that side of my face anymore. I’ve got some feeling in my torso, too, and I’m starting to get some pins-and-needles tingles in my fingers and toes, though I can’t move them yet. That’s supposed to be a good sign—the tingles, I mean—but they’re really uncomfortable and painful.

  Other than that, I can still freely move my left leg—maybe I should learn how to hold a pencil with my toes—and my cracked ribs still ache when I laugh, or when they’re moving me from the bed to the wheelchair. So the Broken Girl’s mending, but it’s taking forever.

  I’m thinking I should give up my loft, but I hate the idea because I’ve been there forever. I moved into it back when that whole part of Crowsea was pretty seedy and the rent was dirt cheap. Now, block by block, building by building, they’re gentrifying the whole area. Forget being a student and living there these days.

  But it’ll be months before I can move back in, if ever. It makes no sense to keep it, except as storage space, and that’s expensive storage space now. I haven’t talked about it with anybody because packing everything up and moving it into storage will be just one more burden I’ll be putting on my friends.

  I find myself missing Daniel, my nurse from the ICU. He worked me hard, and I know I’ve said his chatty good humor used to drive me crazy sometimes, but I’m guilty of the same thing in normal circumstances. The nurses are really nice here, too, but it’s not quite the same. When I left he gave me a brooch that he said used to belong to his mother—“What? I’m supposed to wear it?” he said when I told him he should keep it. It was just cost
ume jewelry, one of those oval miniatures of an English cottage with a frame of fake pearls and a kind of brassy metal, but I like it. I keep it pinned to my pillow.

  Maybe Sophie was right and he really did like me. As if. It’s not like he’s been by to see me since I got transferred to rehab.

  But I can’t believe the parade of visitors I’ve had since I was first admitted into the hospital. I didn’t know I even knew that many people. Christy’s always joking that the only reason I don’t know everyone in Newford is that I haven’t met the last few stragglers yet and after the past few weeks, I’m starting to believe it’s true. Once I got moved out of the intensive care unit, I had so many flowers in my room at one point that my bed felt like it was nested in the middle of a garden. I liked it, but after a while it began to feel a bit like overkill, so I got Daniel to spread them out to some of the other rooms on the floor to share in the bounty. Hopefully nobody minded—the people who brought the flowers, I mean. I know the other patients appreciated them.

  The cards I kept. I had them pasted all over my room in the hospital, and now that I’m in rehab, they’re decorating the walls here. But the sheer numbers makes me feel pretty humble.

  You rely on your friends at a time like this and mine have been supportive above and beyond the call of duty—especially Sophie and Wendy and Angel. But then if any of them were ever in the hospital, I’d have moved into their room myself, so their coming by as often as they do isn’t really a surprise.

  It’s all the others, people I just didn’t expect. Coworkers from Kathryn’s Café where I still work part-time. Fellow volunteers from the food bank and the soup kitchen, from Angel’s Outreach program and St. Vincent’s Home for the Aged. Teachers and students from the Newford School of Art and kids from the Memorial Arts Court that Isabelle founded a few years ago in memory of her writer friend, Katharine Mully. I’m there at least one afternoon a week—at least I used to be—talking to the street kids about art.

  Actually, I guess I do volunteer work in a lot of places. Sometimes I wonder if I’m really trying to help, if it’s payback for how I was helped, or if I’m trying to atone for the kind of person I was before Angel and Lou got me off the streets. I wasn’t necessarily a bad person; I just wasn’t very thoughtful or considerate of anybody else. Sometimes what you don’t do is just as bad or worse than what you do.

  So anyway, there’s all of those people, and then there’s all the others, the ones I just sort of know, from the guys at my local fire station to my city councilor, and people I hardly ever see anymore. Little Jillian’s adoptive parents brought her by—I think it’s so cool that they let Sophie and me still be Jillian’s godparents. Katy Bean, the red-haired storyteller who took over Jack Daw’s bus on the edge of the Tombs, visited with her sister Kerry. Zeffy and Max dropped in and played a few new songs—they’re really sounding good as a duo. Geordie’s old musical partner Amy came by as well, though she didn’t bring her Uillean pipes, which is probably just as well. While they aren’t as loud as Highland pipes, they’re still an acquired taste and I don’t know if the other people on the ward would have taken to them.

  I’ve even been visited by a few of Isabelle’s numena, those secret spirit people that her paintings brought into the World As It Is from someplace even more distant and mysterious than the dreamlands. Paddyjack and Cosette. Rosalind, John Sweetgrass, and the strangest pair of all, younger versions of Isabelle herself and the dead Kathy, ghosts from the past looking just as I remember them from all those years ago.

  The numena sneak off Isabelle’s farm on Wren Island, late at night when there’s less chance of anyone seeing them, and slip into my hospital room to offer comfort and companionship. Sometimes, when they’re with me, I feel like I’m dreaming, that my room in the hospital, and now the rehab, has been transported to some part of the dreamlands, because how else could such wonderful creatures exist? It’s not that they look different from you or me—except for Paddyjack, of course, a thin little scarecrow man who seems to be made as much of twigs and leaves as he is flesh and bone. But he’s a sweet little fellow and has that same large presence that the others do, the sense that their spirits are so big, they can’t quite fit into their bodies. You can feel them before they come into a room, a pressure in the air, a presence that makes your pulse quicken and a smile come to your face without them having to say a word.

  After they leave, I always think of Isabelle and what it must be like for her, having to be so careful of what she paints, because her paintings can literally bring her subjects to life. With that kind of responsibility, it’s no wonder that these days she’s still mostly painting abstracts.

  Maisie Flood and her adopted brother Tommy have been by a few times, with their little terrier Rexy hidden in Maisie’s knapsack. That dog just becomes a nervous wreck if he’s separated from her too long. I love Tommy. He’s simpleminded—Maisie found him abandoned in the Tombs and took him in like she did the little pack of dogs that make up the rest of their family—but he’s one of the sweetest guys I know. Whenever he visits he brings all these little figures of people that Maisie cuts out of magazines and sticks on cardboard backings for him. He spreads them out on the bed and tells me all their stories.

  More cards and letters arrive all the time, too. I hope people understand that I can’t actually reply to them. There was even a card from Natty Newlyn in Ireland, a crazy drawing of her and her beau Ally breaking me out of the hospital like we’re escaping from some dark and dismal dungeon. If I close my eyes, I can see that cheeky grin of hers when she’s pulled some prank or another, and then I hear her innocent, “Don’t go all serious on me now. I was only messin’.”

  I guess the best and worst visit was when Geordie flew in from L.A. on the weekend before I got transferred to the rehab center.

  It’s nothing Geordie says or does. I love seeing him, but it hurts so much, too. That’s never happened before. I’ve always been able to deal with our friendship being just that, but having lost the other most important thing in my life—my art—it’s just too hard having lost him as well. The Broken Girl’s needy and she just wants to steal him away from Tanya. He’s not in the room with me for more than five minutes and I know he has to leave the city and get back to her as soon as possible before I say or do something stupid. That would just complicate everybody’s life and it wouldn’t be fair. Which isn’t to say I think he’d drop Tanya to be with me—Geordie’s not built like that. He’s way too loyal and besides, he really cares about her.

  And even if he wasn’t involved with Tanya, what would I have to offer him? The Broken Girl’s no bargain as she is, and that’s not even counting all the other issues I have with intimacy. Though, of course, I have to ask, I have to know, how he and Tanya are doing. I was the one who sent him to L.A. to be with her in the first place, but it doesn’t mean I wanted to, or that I don’t have this curiosity about their relationship that’s part wanting things to go well for them because they’re my friends, and part my own morbid fascination with what I can’t have.

  “So how’s it going with you guys?” I ask, not long after he gets here.

  “With Tanya, it’s great,” he says, “but I’m never going to fit into that city.”

  “How can it be so bad? There’s movie stars and sun twelve months of the year.”

  “The sun I like,” he says with a smile, “but the rest I could do without. Mostly it’s all these people we have to make nice to because of Tanya’s career.”

  He launches into a couple of the worst movie-business specimens he’s run into lately and I just want to say, so leave that place. Come back here. Come back and be with me.

  “But your music’s going well, isn’t it?” I say instead.

  He’s been doing a lot of studio work since he got there, playing on soundtracks and at various recording sessions.

  “I suppose. But it’s not the same. All my gigs are so structured and you always have this clock running in your head telling you that time’s m
oney, so get it right the first time. I really miss just playing on a street corner, but that’d look bad for Tanya if some tabloid snapped a picture of me doing it.”

  Geordie’s the only musician I know who actually prefers busking. “It keeps me honest,” he likes to say. “If people like what you’re doing, they stop and listen, maybe throw you a few coins. If they don’t, they just walk on by. Where else can you get such an honest reaction to your music?”

  There’s no real analogy for art, but I know what he means all the same. It’s the reason I’ve never lost touch with my street roots. Sure, it’s not always pretty out there. Actually, it can be downright heartbreaking. But it does keep you honest as a person. As soon as we forget that those are people, living there on the street, I think we start to lose our humanity. The way the world works now, any one of us could wake up one morning and find they have nothing. Look what happened to me. It’s only by the grace of the professor’s having kept up an insurance plan for me that means I won’t come out of here one day and have nothing left because everything I owned went to pay for my medical bills.

  It’s not like you can plan getting hit by a car, or any of the thousand and one other catastrophes that are potentially waiting out there for us.

  “You shouldn’t have to give up being yourself,” I tell Geordie, and this is me as his friend talking, not me trying to get Tanya and him to break up.

  “I know,” he says. “But I promised I’d give it a shot and if I quit now, I won’t have done that, will I?”

  “I guess not.”

  He gives me a wan smile. “At least I’ve still got my music.”

  We’ve talked about this before, the way you do late at night when you’re sitting in each other’s apartment, or in a café somewhere, and feeling, not exactly melancholy, but taking a kind of stock as to who you are and what you’re doing with your life. You bring up weird what-ifs. Like if you had to lose one of your senses, which would it be? Or if you had to lose a limb. Pointless conversations, really, but they did reiterate how important his music is to him, my art to me. Neither of us could imagine life without it, so he knows exactly how I’m feeling right now.