"I'm sorry," she said. "There's just a few things I have to work through. I'm not trying to shut you out. Honestly. It's just … I don't even know what it is. I guess that's part of what I have to work out."
She gave him a wan smile, hoping he'd understand, hoping this wouldn't change things between them, but knowing it already had. Oh, why did it even have to have come up?
"It's okay," Rory told her.
They started walking again, an uncomfortable awkwardness keeping pace with them for blocks as they tried to get past the tension that had crept up and settled in between them. Lily was beginning to feel so miserable that, even though it felt like the wrong time, she was ready to tell him anyway. But they had reached her street by then, turned down it, and had arrived in front of her building. She took a steadying breath and let the moment pass.
"I'll drop the color rolls off to be developed first thing in the morning," she said. "The black and whites should be ready by the afternoon, unless I get to them tonight."
Rory shook his head. "Get some rest," he said. He handed her the camera bag. "And, Kit?"
She couldn't find the usual smile that came when he used his pet name for her. Kit, as in Kit Carson, wilderness scout. All she could do was look at him.
"Don't let this get you down," he said. "You need to work something out for yourself, that's all. I really do understand. Okay?"
The words reassured her, but the hug he gave her reassured her more.
"Thanks," she said into his shoulder.
"Hey, what're friends for?"
She meant to go right to bed when she got up to her apartment, but she wasn't tired. So first she developed the rolls of black-and-white film she'd taken earlier in the evening and hung them up to dry on the clothesline she kept in her bathroom for that purpose, then she went into her study and booted up her computer, logging on to her Web server. When she checked for messages, a little box popped up saying, "You Have New Mail!" and she clicked on "OK." The box went away and she scrolled through messages from the photography listserver she was on, deleting each one after she'd skimmed its contents.
The last message was from Donna.
Lily sighed. She still felt a little wrung out from talking to Rory, and now here was Donna who'd be asking all the same questions he had. They weren't meeting face-to-face, so Donna wouldn't be able to read her mood the way Rory had, but Donna also wouldn't let up until she was satisfied that Lily was one hundred percent okay.
Sighing again, Lily began to read. As usual, Donna used snippets of Lily's previous message in her own letter. Lily understood how it made replying easier, but it was the one thing she missed about regular mail. She never liked having her own words come back to her this way.
Sender: [email protected]
Date: Thu, 29 Aug 1996 08:31:09-0500
From: 'Donna Gavin'
Organization: Tamarack Publishing
To: [email protected]
Subject: Tell me more
>I know what you'll think
My God, woman, what did you expect me to think? Who in their right mind goes walking through the Zone at that time of night and on her own?
>Life doesn't really flash before your eyes. It's more like everything shuts down. You're still *there* but you're watching it happen instead of having it actually happen to you. It's the strangest experience.
Please tell me that you won't be doing this anymore. I don't know how I'm going to sleep tonight, worrying that you might be silly enough to be out there again. Read my electronic lips: the streets are not safe!!
>came out of nowhere and rescued me. Joey Bennett one of those, What’re you rebelling against?/What have you got? kinds of guys. Like John Buchman in our final year at Mawson. Remember him? Except Joey doesn’t have that meanness in his eyes.
I remember too well. He used to walk behind me in the halls with this exaggerated limp and then look
all innocent whenever I turned around. He wasn’t just mean, he was smirky mean. I still hate him.
Which doesn’t endear this Joey Bennett of yours to me. I mean, I’m glad he was there and everything, but all I can picture is someone too good-looking for his own good and creepy.
>I still have no idea why I can be calm about all of this
I can’t figure it out either, and you’re being *so* sketchy with the details. You tell me this gypsy cab driver rescues you, but what happened to the guy who attacked you? Are you sure you’re okay? What did the police say? How long were you stuck dealing with them? Was he charged? Is he out on the street again?
And really, *what* were you doing in the Zone anyway? Don’t keep me hanging on with this. I need to know ASAP.
I’d tell you my news, but I don’t have anything that can even compare with yours and if you want to know the truth, I wish you didn’t either. But I did have lunch with that fellow named Peter that I met at Miranda's party and he asked me to go to a movie with him next week. And before you ask, I said yes, except I don't have anything to wear and I'm about to get my period and I think it'll be a disaster.
Write back as *soon* as you read this.
Love
D.
Lily had wanted to tell Donna everything, but she hadn't known where to begin. It was like talking to Rory. She'd already told both of them about Jack and his stories, but it required a great leap of faith to jump from stories as they were told, no matter how charming, to the idea that things in such stories could be real. She wasn't sure either of them could make the leap—especially not Rory. One of the things he and Christy were forever arguing about was how Christy wrote his stories of fantastical urban folklore as though the events and things described in them were real.
Maybe she should talk to Christy about it, except she couldn't even begin seeing herself do that. If she couldn't talk to her best friends, how could she bring it up with a relative stranger?
You talked to Joey about it, she thought. And you only just met him.
Yeah, but he was there.
No, like Rory, Donna was simply going to have to wait until Lily had worked things through to the point where she could talk about it, whatever that point might be. At least she had an idea as to where she could start. First thing tomorrow, after she'd dropped off the color film to be processed, she would try to find Jack and talk to him.
She returned her attention to her computer screen, but more than three minutes had passed since she'd touched the keyboard or mouse and the screen-saver had long since kicked in. The dark screen drew her gaze, swallowing it until she hit the "Shift" key to bring her program back. Moving the cursor to "Reply," she clicked her mouse. The screen came up with a blank box, the sending information for a reply message to Donna automatically filled in above it. Don't be mad at me, she thought as she moved her cursor to the top line of the box and began to type.
7.
Hank started the morning by walking through the Tombs. He took a familiar route that wound through empty lots and streets fronted by derelict buildings and eventually brought him to a large flat stretch of pavement well north of Gracie Street that he'd cleared at the beginning of the summer. It might have been a parking lot once, or the ground floor of a building—there was no way of telling anymore. It didn't really matter. It served his purpose now.
At one rubble-strewn edge he emptied the contents of a small paper bag of dog kibbles onto the pavement, then he walked out into the middle of the open area and stripped down to the exercise shorts he was wearing under his jeans and laced up his running shoes. He did a hundred sit-ups, followed by a hundred push-ups, letting the count hold his thoughts like a form of meditation and clear his head. It wasn't until he was a half hour into his tai chi exercises that the dog showed up.
Hank didn't know what kind of a dog it was—Tombs-mutt was the way Moth described it—but there had to be some shepherd in its background, a lot of mastiff, and maybe some ghost wolf in the blood, letting it move like silk in a soft breeze for all its size, silent and almost invisible when st
ill. It stood thirty inches at the shoulder, wide-chested, head massive, body leaner than a mastiff but carrying a lot more bulk than a shepherd. There was nothing gentle about it, but it didn't display any aggressive behavior either—unless you tried to approach it.
After the one glance, Hank ignored the dog, finishing his exercises while the dog ate. When he went for his run, the dog fell in beside him. It wouldn't let him pet it, wouldn't let him near it, but every morning it ate the food he put out and joined Hank for his run.
They took a circuitous route through the streets, abandoned tenements and factories rearing up on both sides. There were squatters in the buildings, runaway teenagers and less innocent inhabitants: junkies, bikers, bums, crazy people who were no longer legally crazy once the public money to keep them in an institution dried up. He didn't see them, not at this time of the morning, but he knew he was watched. Not every day, not from the same building, but the squatters knew him, saw him go by, a man wearing only a pair of shorts with a big mongrel dog loping at his side. Nobody bothered them.
One morning a biker looked up from the Harley he was working on, wiped his greasy hands on his greasier jeans, and wanted to know the dog's name.
"Never asked him," Hank had replied.
The biker had nodded, needing no more explanation, just as Hank didn't need to know what he was doing up so early when most of the bikers slept till noon. He'd never given the dog a name, never gave any of the animals he brought back to Moth's a name. That was Moth's thing. And Anita's.
But this morning he looked at the dog running so casually beside him and wondered, not about its name, but if it knew anything about animal people.
When he got back from his run, he put on his jeans and T-shirt and went down to Cray's gym to have a shower and shave. The dog was already gone by the time he stepped off the pavement to head back out through the rubbled lots surrounding it.
Jack wasn't home when Hank dropped by the school bus later in the day, but Katy was. He didn't see her at first, though she was right out in the open. He remembered what Moth had said about her invisibility once. He'd known exactly what Moth was talking about, though he'd learned it a lot earlier than Moth had. He had that trick down by the time he was five. Jack had been standing nearby, listening, and said, "Maybe she's a ghost," but he and Moth knew better. There was no such thing as ghosts. Dead was dead. If anything survived the body, neither could think of one good reason that it would stick around.
Katy wasn't a ghost. Even with her penchant for bright colors and that red hair of hers, she simply had it down pat, that knack for not being noticed.
Hank slipped into his own quiet mode when he reached Jack's place, sensing someone nearby but not seeing anyone. He stood there for almost five minutes, blending into the background himself, until Katy came into view, slowly, the way Lewis Carroll had described his Cheshire cat's comings and goings. When Hank finally focused on her, she was out in front of the bus, propped up against an arm of the sofa with her legs stretched out, reading a book called Practical Bird-watching and drinking coffee.
"Is there an unpractical kind of bird-watching?" Hank had to ask.
She looked up and smiled. "Sure. Doing it without reading the book first."
She brought her knees up to make room for him and he sat down. She looked like somebody's punky kid sister today, no makeup, red hair in a ponytail that was pulled through the hole in the back of her baseball cap, wearing purple jean cutoffs and a bright yellow tank top, barefoot. He'd never noticed the tattoo on her shoulder before:
It looked like a Japanese ideograph. The simple black lines seemed to retain the essence of brush marks—no easy feat. He wondered who the tattooist had been and what the symbol meant.
"Anything in there about bird girls?" he asked instead.
"You mean girl birds, don't you? What species?"
Hank thought about it for a moment. Jack wasn't here and he needed to talk.
"It gets more complicated than that," he said.
He gave her an abbreviated rundown of what had happened to him the other night. He didn't make himself out to be a hero, he was just passing by. He didn't talk up the miracle of a raw bullet hole turning into a scar, just like that, from one moment to the next, bruises disappearing like they never were, but he did search and find the right words to describe the birdishness of the girls who had dropped in from who knew where to help him out.
"The woman," he said. "Lily. She thought they were animal people—like in Jack's stories."
Katy didn't even blink an eye.
"You've seen the crow girls," she said. "You're so lucky."
That sense of stepping outside the world returned to Hank. Looked like everybody had bought into this stuff and he never knew it. He thought they were all hearing stories, no more, just like him.
"Did you ever run into something you'd never heard of before and then suddenly you hear about it wherever you turn?"
He wasn't even aware he'd been talking aloud until Katy replied.
"Sure," she said. "It's called synchronicity."
"Right."
"It happens way more than people think. What they're calling coincidence is really just patterns coming together. There's people that can see them, but I wouldn't want to be like them. It'd ruin the surprise."
Hank nodded slowly, like he was listening, but in his mind he was backing up their conversation. Bird girls. Crow girls. Sure, why not? If you were going to take Jack's stories at face value, it fit. Those two girls had been like a pair of raggedy crows.
"You heard about these crow girls from Jack?" he asked.
She nodded. And now Hank, thinking about it, realized that he had, too, though he couldn't reach out and pick a particular story that he remembered them from. But there was always a pair of them, up to mischief, living on Zen time. According to Jack people changed, inside, where you couldn't mark it, just from seeing them.
Hank touched his shoulder, then let his hand fall. Of course people changed. Once you put these bird girls into the equation, you had to redefine the world.
"You believe everything Jack says?" he asked.
Katy shook her head. "Jack says she can't kill me, but he's wrong about that."
"Who's 'she'?" Hank asked.
"My sister."
"I didn't know you had a sister."
"I don't. At least I don't anymore. It's complicated."
Silence hung between them for a long moment.
"There are no guarantees," Hank said finally. "I guess we all know that. Anybody can get hurt. But maybe what Jack meant was that we won't let anything happen to you—not without a fight."
"There's nothing anybody can do about it," she told him. "It's just the way it is."
Hank liked the sound of that even less. "Give me an address and I'll explain the situation to whoever's bothering you."
"It's not like that," Katy said.
"So what is it like?"
He wouldn't have thought it possible, but a half hour later he left with a story even stranger than the one he'd brought with him.
The day was starting to catch up on him by the time he reached Tony's store on Flood Street, just a few blocks south of Gracie. He normally slept from midmorning until around four, catching his six to seven hours and then having breakfast when most people were thinking about dinner. It was almost three-thirty now and he could feel it. A dryness behind his eyes. Bad taste in his mouth. Everything had an edge, especially his own nerves.
He was too old to be pulling all-nighters, he thought as he closed the door behind him.
A 45 by The Animals was spinning on the turntable—"Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood." The state-of-the-art sound system made you think the band was still together and playing in the store. Tony could as easily have been playing some classic Glenn Gould piano, Lester Young sax, Moth's favorite—Boxcar Willie—or something by local punk-folksinger Annabel Blue. It was that kind of a place. The store had no name, only a cardboard sign in the window reading, "USED
RECORDS, TAPES." All they dealt in was vinyl, cassettes and 8-tracks. No CDs. You didn't want to start Tony on an analog-versus-digital argument. Most of the off-the-street trade was DJs, buying and selling 12-inches. The real business was done by mail order, shipping product all over the world.
Tony looked up when Hank came in, a grin splitting his face. He always reminded Hank of a ventriloquist's dummy, exaggerated puppet features peppered with freckles and topped by a shock of curly red hair combed up and back in an impressive ducktail. There wasn't much meat to him—he was too lean, narrow-hipped and long-limbed—but he was stronger than he looked and a stand-up guy. He and Hank went way back to juvie. The only reason Tony wasn't doing time these days was because Hank had put up the money for the store, pretty much forcing Tony to go legit. Music was his one passion and having the taste of what he had, he wasn't willing to risk losing it all for some quick money that was all too likely to put him back inside. Not the first time out, maybe, or even the second or third, but sooner or later.
"You look like shit," Tony said.
"Haven't slept yet."
"You want to crash in back for a few hours?"
"Not yet," Hank said. "Maybe later. Anything new?"
Tony smiled. "If what you're really asking is, 'Where are the tapes?' " he said, "I haven't got them duped yet. I told you they wouldn't be ready till Friday."
Whenever Hank found some choice vinyl, he left it with Tony; in exchange, he got a tape of whatever it was he'd brought in. Earlier in the week he'd come across some classic 'Trane on their original pressings, including a mint copy of the 1957 Prestige issue of Traneing In.
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