The Onion Girl

by Charles de Lint

  It really is a whole other world up here, and much livelier than the quiet, stately cathedral feel that I get below on the forest floor. I see more wildlife than I saw below. Here there are songbirds in plenty—finches, sparrows, wrens, bluebirds, cardinals—flitting among the smaller branches, and all sorts of little lizards and butterflies and bugs. We pass sleeping moths that are bigger than my two hands put together, with creamy wings that look like they’d be soft as velvet to the touch. Noisy red and black squirrels arguing with each other and scolding anybody who comes by. Fat rabbits, chewing on clover. I see that one of them has a small set of antlers, like the supposedly mythical jackalope in Texas and the Southwest, before they slip away.

  “Why are you smiling?” Toby asks.

  Smiling? I think. Surely, I’m grinning like a loon.

  “I can’t help it,” I tell him. “All my life I’ve read about people who manage to find themselves in some magical otherworld full of marvels and wonder, and now here I am.” I wave a hand at the branch/road we’re walking along. “Now I’m in the impossible place, and I just love it. I wish I never—”

  But I break off before I finish the sentence.

  “You never what?” Toby asks.

  Have to go back to my broken body, I think.

  “Have to wake up,” is all I say.

  “Why do you have to?”

  “The same reason you’re an Eadar, I guess. That’s where my real life is and until I finish dealing with everything back there, I can’t go on to whatever might be waiting for me here.”

  “I hate rules, don’t you?” Toby says.

  “Rules?”

  “You know, whatever makes our lives have to be one way and not another.”

  I think about getting run down by a car and having my body left lying there on the side of the street like so much broken china. And I think about older hurts, the ones that twist like scars across my memory and no one but me knows I’m carrying them.

  “I suppose I do,” I say.

  He gives me a considering look, then shrugs. “Come on,” he says. “We have to get higher up.”

  I love this world of trees. The broad boughs overlap one another so that it’s possible to continue walking to the top as though following a switchback trail on a steep mountainside. But closer to the trunk there’s a veritable nest of vines and tangled branches that Toby leads me up and I feel less like a Jack and more like a monkey as we climb and climb.

  Eventually, we don’t reach the top, but we do clamber up onto what turns out to be several branches growing snug together, one against the other, forming a huge natural platform. Standing on it feels like being on a raft, the slight sway of the giant tree taking the place of a slow river current. The branches open up here and an incredible vista is revealed. It’s soon apparent that large as the trees of the Greatwood are, this one we’re climbing dwarfs them, for we’re looking out across the tops of the forest, westward, I think. In the far distance I can see where the forest ends and a range of foothills climb up the skirts of a mountain range. On the closest hill is what appears to be a structure of some sort. A castle, or a chateau. I can’t tell. It’s too small to make out from this distance.

  I look up and see that the tree we’re in still goes up and up, its heights disappearing from sight. No wonder the topmost twigs are supposed to be magical. It would be a fairy-tale journey into forever just to reach them. My gaze goes back to the structure on those distant hills.

  “What’s that place?” I ask my companion.

  “The Inn of the Star-Crossed. It’s a place where gather those who have been ill-treated by the fates. It’s not a happy place.”

  “It’s an inn? But it looks so big.”

  Toby laughs. “So it’s a big inn.” He tugs my sleeve. “You’re not stopping, are you? We still have magics to gather.”

  I let my gaze go traveling back up the trunk of the tree until it gets lost in the maze of branches.

  “How far is the top?” I ask.

  “I don’t know. I’ve never been there.” He laughs again. “Do I look like a wizard to you?”

  “But are there really magic twigs up there?”

  “Bushels of them,” he assures me.

  “Why haven’t you gone to the top before?”

  “I never had anyone who’d come that far with me,” he says. “It’s a very long journey. Nobody has time anymore.”

  “How long a journey?”

  “That’s a tricky question.”

  “Hours, days, weeks, months?” I ask.

  “It all depends on who you are and how badly you want to get there—at least that’s what I’ve heard.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Well, it’s like a lot of things, I suppose. The more you want it or need it, the harder it is to get.”

  I sigh. There must be something in the air of the dreamlands that makes people particularly oblique. I mean, look at Joe. It’s so hard to get a straight answer out of him sometimes.

  “Can you give me an even remotely more comprehensible answer?” I ask.

  He gives me a guilty look. “I need that magic so badly,” he says. “So I know I’ll never get there on my own. With those twigs in hand I wouldn’t have to worry about fading ever again.”

  “I still don’t understand.”

  “Well, look at you,” he says. “You’re coming along for the lark of it, aren’t you? Doesn’t matter if there’s magic or not. I thought with you accompanying me we’d just … be there so much more quickly.”

  “Because. I’m not desperate for magic.”

  He nods.

  I think about how my life has been, always following the scent and incident of magic, and how my life is now, that of a Broken Girl, waiting for a miracle to save her.

  “You don’t know how badly I could use some magic,” I tell him.

  He slumps down onto the branch.

  “Then we’re doomed,” he says. “Doomed to never find it.”

  “It’s not the end of the world,” I say.

  “But it could be the end of my life.”

  “I’ll never stop believing in you.”

  “Maybe that won’t be enough,” he tells me.

  He gets up then and abruptly begins to descend down the rat’s nest of branches and vines we climbed to reach this odd platform of branches. He’s very good at just walking away from a problem and it’s starting to annoy me.

  “Was that the only reason you hung around with me?” I yell down at him. “Because you saw me as the way to get yourself a piece of some magic?”

  He pauses and looks back up at me, puckish good humor vanished. All I see is sorrow now.

  “I thought you liked me,” I say.

  “I did. I do. It’s just … you wouldn’t understand.”

  And then he looks away and continues his descent, moving so quickly that he’s soon out of sight. I study the route down for a long moment before lifting my gaze back up. Up and up. The top of the tree’s somewhere high above me, but I’m not going to go looking for it on my own. I’m not going to climb all the way back down again, either. Now that I’ve been here, I can reappear on this platform the next time I return to the dreamlands. If I want to.

  But right now, I’ve had my fill of giant trees and magic lands, and I just let myself wake up, back in the rehab.

  4

  Wendy ended up going to visit Cassie by herself to see if Cassie could help them find out anything about this mysterious twin of Jilly’s. She’d felt there was no point in trying to get Sophie to come with her since Sophie’s reticence to talk about the dreamlands with any seriousness might hinder a useful conversation. And there was no one else she could have asked to accompany her. Jilly hadn’t talked about the dreamlands to anyone except for Sophie and herself. She was apparently keeping it secret from everyone else. And if that was the case, Wendy didn’t feel it was fair for her to be the one to make public those secrets.

  Cassie and Joe lived in the north en
d of Upper Foxville. It wasn’t much of a place, a basement apartment in an old run-down building, but Wendy supposed it was a step up from the squats they used to live in. The surprise came once she got past the front door and stepped into their apartment. While the building might have appeared dilapidated and gloomy from the outside, and the foyer hadn’t exactly been ready to win any Good Housekeeping awards, Cassie and Joe’s apartment itself was cheerful with color and light, though where exactly the light was coming from, Wendy couldn’t tell. It was as if the furnishings were casting their own illumination. Or maybe it was simply a reflection of Cassie’s personality—the glow she carried about her that seemed to contain some echo of all that was kind and right in the world.

  I know some good people, Wendy thought as she followed Cassie into the apartment. And most of them she’d met through Jilly.

  “I’m trying to remember,” Cassie said. “Are you a tea or a coffee drinker?”

  “Actually,” Wendy said, “I wouldn’t mind a beer if you have any.”

  Cassie smiled. “A woman after my own heart. Make yourself comfortable, I’ll be right back.”

  Wendy wandered around the room, taking in the contradictory decor. Somehow all the African and Native art and artifacts blended perfectly, if however improbably, with the most commercial kitsch. Pez dispensers based on Star Wars and Disney characters shared a shelf with small fetish carvings from both Africa and the rez. A gold-painted plaster Elvis bust stood on another shelf with a beautiful African print scarf draped around its shoulders. Swanee whistles, kazoos, and a plastic Gene Autry ukulele missing its strings shared the top of a cedar chest with some skin-headed drums from Africa, an Apache wooden flute, and a Kickaha water drum. Moose- and deer-hide medicine bags hung on the wall beside an outdated poster advertising the new fall lineup on one of the local TV stations. On the other side of the poster was an African mask carved from some dark wood. A small throw pillow with Bart Simpson’s features on it lay against a stunning Navajo blanket hanging over the back of the sofa.

  The room had the charm and curiously harmonizing effect of a crowded junk shop, the sort of place you could lose yourself in for hours, but it wasn’t an apartment that Wendy could ever live in herself.

  She was standing in front of a small oil painting that Jilly had done a couple of years ago when Cassie returned to the living room with their beers. The painting was a portrait of Cassie and Joe holding hands, the two of them sitting under her own Tree of Tales in Fitzhenry Park. She recognized it as her tree because whenever Jilly painted it, she always put in any number of small colored ribbons among its leaves, so cleverly rendered that they seemed to grow there, a natural phenomenon rather than an intrusion. The ribbons were to represent the stories that fed the tree, Jilly explained the first time Wendy had asked her about them.

  “I love that painting,” Cassie said as she handed Wendy her beer. They tipped the tops of their bottles against each other. “Joe looks just so … Joe.”

  “I like the way she’s captured the affection between the two of you.”

  Cassie smiled. “That, too.”

  She waved Wendy to a seat on the sofa, then settled on the other end, pulling the Bart Simpson pillow onto her lap.

  “I’ve never been here before,” Wendy said, “but I can see why you and Jilly get along so well. You have a similar eclectic taste.”

  “I met her through Joe, actually. But it’s true. We do get along, and have from the day we met.” Cassie smiled. “There’s not a lot of other women I’d let spend as much time as she does with my partner, but I trust her implicitly. Joe, too, of course.”

  “It’s just this gift she has,” Wendy said, paraphrasing one of Jilly’s favorite expressions.

  Cassie’s smile broadened. “But it’s interesting how she connects so many of us who might not otherwise seem to have all that much in common. I don’t mean you or Sophie so much as people like Sue who’s so uptown or …” She started to laugh. “The Crowsea Fire Department.”

  Wendy began to laugh as well. “I know. Can you believe that they all came to see her?”

  “With Jilly I’m ready to believe anything.”

  “She can be very convincing,” Wendy said.

  Cassie nodded and Wendy decided that this was the perfect opening to segue into why she’d come here.

  “But I’m not so convinced about her new role,” Wendy added.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know, the dutiful patient, doing what she’s told just so that she can get well.”

  “Now you’ve completely lost me,” Cassie told her.

  “Well, it’s the main reason I’m here,” Wendy said.

  She went on to explain her suspicion that Jilly was getting ready to simply disappear into the dreamlands forever, ending with the mystery of this doppelgänger that both Isabelle and Sophie had seen in the vicinity of Jilly’s loft recently.

  “That’s what you sensed in her studio when you went over, wasn’t it?” Wendy said. “A kind of twin Jilly, only a bad one.”

  Cassie hesitated before answering.

  “I sensed that the paintings had been destroyed by someone with a similar energy to hers,” she said finally. “Not that whoever did it looked like her.”

  “But a dark energy instead of a bright one, right?”

  Cassie nodded.

  “And this person could look like Jilly, couldn’t she?”

  “I suppose,” Cassie said, obviously reluctant at where all of this was going. “But you make it sound like the plot of some dumb B-movie, where, big surprise, the villain turns out to be the dark side of the hero.”

  “If we use Jilly’s usual logic,” Wendy argued, “even bad B-movies have their basis in some kind of truth.”

  Cassie shook her head. “I don’t know. This is something Joe would know more about.”

  “Where is Joe?”

  “On a wild goose chase, looking for Gaea.”

  “Gaea?” Wendy repeated, certain she’d misheard.

  Cassie shrugged. “That’s what the Greeks called her—the mother of the world. Or more correctly, ‘the Deep-breasted One.’ Joe calls her Nokomis.”

  “But … what do you mean he’s looking for her? That’s like, well, looking for God, isn’t it? How would you even start to do something like that, besides entering a seminary?”

  “Joe went looking for her in the dreamlands,” Cassie said.

  The reply was so not what Wendy had been expecting that for a long moment she couldn’t speak. She’d accepted—at least most of the time she did—that there was this other world where you could run into faeries and goblins and animal people and who knew what other sorts of magical beings. A place where Sophie, and now Jilly, could have these amazing adventures. It was easier to think of it as the dreamlands, a place you could visit when you were asleep and dreaming, than as the spiritworld, some magical parallel dimension that you could simply step into from this one, but even that she could usually go along with—in theory, at least. But this seemed too much.

  “You can meet God there?”

  “Gods, plural,” Cassie replied. “Apparently. I never have, but Joe’s met this one before.”

  “But it was just someone who called herself that, right? He didn’t really meet …”

  Wendy didn’t even know what to call her. The Goddess? Mother Nature? The Earth Mother?

  “Joe’s an unusual guy,” Cassie said, “so it wouldn’t surprise me. He’s not like you or me. His roots go back a lot further than ours do. In fact, he goes back a lot further than we do. He’s older than he looks, you know.”

  “How much older?”

  “I don’t know. I never asked.”

  Wendy took a steadying breath. She looked down at her hand and saw she was still holding her beer, so she took a swallow of the amber liquid. The flavor barely registered.

  “Okay,” she said, setting the bottle down on the coffee table between a clay sculpture of a turtle and a shot glass with a “Buff
y the Vampire Slayer” logo on its side. “I know the world’s weirder than I ever think it is, even though I have to be reminded from time to time. So I’ll give you all of that.”

  Cassie shook her head. “I’m not asking you to believe or disbelieve anything.”

  “I know. It’s just that, don’t you see? What you’re saying is so amazing, right? So if it’s possible to actually meet God in the dreamlands, then why shouldn’t it be possible for Jilly to have an evil twin?”

  Cassie smiled. “Just because you have a tree that is nourished on stories, does that mean Elvis is really still alive?”

  “Well, no.”

  “And Nokomis isn’t God,” she went on. “At least she’s not my conception of what we usually mean by God. She’s an elder being, I’ll grant you that. Probably been around since the first days, or even before the world was made.”

  “So what would you call that?”

  “Like I said, an elder being. They’re different from us, powerful in ways we aren’t, and certainly longer-lived, but I believe someone like Nokomis embodies our perceptions of a deity, not her own. I don’t have a name for the life force I perceive making up the fabric of the world and all the beings in it, but I don’t think she’s it. Or even the more traditional ideas of God. I believe we’re all part of this … I guess I’ll call it the Wheel that is the World, the way that Joe does.”

  “But even he believes in something called the Grace,” Wendy said. “I remember Jilly telling me about it one time.”

  Cassie nodded. “Except, as I understand it, Grace is a state, like the Kickaha’s concept of Beauty, and we all carry a piece of it inside us so long as we don’t deny it and push it away.”

  “I still think it’s worth checking out this evil twin business,” Wendy said. “First there’s the hit-and-run with the car, then Jilly’s studio gets trashed. What’s she going to do next?”

  “She?”

  “The evil twin.”

  Cassie didn’t say anything for a long moment. Then she got up and went over to where her jacket was hanging from the back of a chair. She reached into the inside pocket and brought out a deck of cards held together with a rubber band.