He came out of it the moment Paris sat down on the couch beside him. She gave him a quick kiss on the cheek, then leaned back to look at him.
"There's something different about you today," she said. "Did you get laid or something?"
Hank smiled. "Just deep in thought."
"Yeah, right. The only guy I know who thinks less than you is Moth. I think you're in love."
"You think?" he asked, keeping his voice light.
She shrugged. "Who knows? But I hope she's good for you." Before he could admit to or deny her observation, she was already plunging on. "So what are you doing here on a Sunday afternoon? Coming to take me for a coffee?"
"You want a coffee?"
"Nah. I've had so many already today I feel like the store was named after me." She grinned and made a buzzing sound. "What's up?"
As he began to explain, she put a hand in front of her mouth, but wasn't able to stop the giggle.
"Now what?" he said.
It took her a moment to be able to speak.
"Nothing," she managed finally, humor still dancing in her eyes. "It's just that when you first started talking I thought you meant you wanted this tattoo."
He smiled. "What if I did?"
"Then I'd be glad you came to me—keep it in the family, you know?"
She went off on a tangent then and it was another ten minutes before he could finish telling her what he wanted to know.
"A cobra, hmm? That's better than a torpedo, I guess. How's this guy hung?"
"How would I know?"
She was back to giggling again. "I'd think it'd be one of the first things you'd have to ask—to be able to identify him properly, I mean." She tilted her head, studying him for a moment. "How are you going to identify him?"
Paris always did this to him.
"I was hoping to get a name."
"This is too funny. I can just see you going around asking about this guy's dick. Have you talked to Bruno yet?"
Hank nodded, which set her off again. But finally she calmed down enough to actually try to help him.
"Nobody's had it done here," she said. "At least not that I've heard of, and that's the kind of thing that gets talked about, especially if the guy"—she gave him another wicked little smile—"can pull it off."
Hank groaned.
"Okay, okay. I'm being serious already. How about if I ask around for you?"
"That'd be great." He thought of something then. "Got a pen?"
When she dug a black marker out of her back pocket and passed it over to him, he sketched Katy's tattoo on the back of one of the magazines on the coffee table:
[Insert tattoo graphic]
"Ever seen something like this?" he asked. "Or know what it means?"
"Hello?" she said. "I was born in North America, Hank, not China. And besides, that looks Japanese."
Hank smiled. "I know. And you've never been to France, either. I'm asking you because of your so-called expertise as a tattoo artist, sweetheart."
She stuck out her tongue. Picking up the magazine, she tore off the section of the page with the ideograph and stuck it in her pocket.
"I'll ask Rudy for you. He's into that kind of stuff, you know, Akido and Zen and the lot."
"Thanks."
She grabbed his arm and made him sit down when he tried to get up.
"Uh-uh," she said. "Not so fast. Now I want to know all about her."
Hank pretended ignorance. "Her?"
She nodded. "Come on. 'Fess up. Where'd you meet, what's she like? You're not getting out of here until you tell all, so you might as well start now."
So he told her about Lily, because Paris had always known his heart better than he did himself. Better than Moth, better than anyone. It wasn't why they were family, but it was why they were friends.
12.
After they got Kerry settled in with all of her new acquisitions, Annie went across the hall to practice and Rory returned to his own apartment. For a while he sat at his workbench trying to finish up an earring order he had for Tender Hearts, a boutique over on Quinlan that regularly carried his jewelry. Through the cold-air return vent he could hear the faint sound of Annie running over a chord progression on her guitar, augmenting the syncopated pattern with brief flourishes of melody.
A new song, Rory decided, since it didn't sound familiar. He kept expecting her to retreat into her soundproofed studio to put it down on tape, but the music simply went on as though she'd fallen into a meditative trance and forgotten what her hands were doing.
He got about half the order done, his heart not really into the job. It was dull, mindless work—repeating a design that had been fun the first couple of times he'd made it, but only bored him now. Finally he shut off the light above the worktable and went into his study to finish the article for Spin.
It was quiet upstairs now. Annie had either fallen asleep or she'd finally gone into her studio. There was no piano playing in Kerry's apartment and the rest of the house was still as well, though, except for Lucius's twice-daily migrations across his apartment when the whole house would creak and moan, the top floor was always quiet.
The article didn't need much work—a paragraph tightened here, a few explanatory lines to add there, rewrite the intro to refer to a couple of Lily's photos. When it was done he made a stab at a short story he'd promised Alan Grant for The Crowsea Review, a literary journal Alan had published during his college years and was in the process of reviving.
He didn't get far with the story. Fiction never came as easily for him as did nonfiction—mostly, he supposed, because it seemed to engage the same part of his mind that was so easily distracted by puzzles such as the one presented by the crow girls not seeming to have aged a day in all the time he'd known them. More confusing, Annie said she thought they were in their twenties, while to him, they were impossibly forever fourteen. Which then begged the question, if they looked different for different people, who was to say they weren't the switchblade-wielding women who'd appeared out of nowhere the other night and rescued Lily and Hank Walker?
He tried to concentrate on the story, but his gaze kept lifting from his computer screen to settle on the trunk of the elm tree that he could see from the window of his study. Maybe Maida and Zia really did live in that bloody tree. They certainly spent enough time in it. He half-expected to see them come swinging down from its branches and cross the lawn to peer back into the window at him.
Finally he gave up on making any sort of worthwhile addition to the story tonight. He saved the file—though he didn't know why he bothered since he hadn't added more than a couple of lines to it in all the time he'd been sitting here, and he knew he'd be rewriting them the next time he opened the file. Frowning, he shut off the computer, then decided he was being too hard on himself. The evening wasn't a total loss. He'd gotten the article done and another dozen earrings ready to take in to Tender Hearts. The story would come. In its own time, it was true, but it would come.
Fetching himself a beer from the fridge, he walked out onto the front porch with it. The evening was well settled into night now, the street quiet, the light from the street lamps casting pronounced shadows. He sat down on the wicker bench and stretched out his legs. The crow girls were so much on his mind that when someone settled down on the bench beside him, he was surprised to see it was Annie, not one of them. He offered her some of his beer.
She took a long swallow then handed it back. "Thanks."
"Were you working on a new song?" he asked.
"I wish."
"What I heard didn't sound familiar."
Annie made a tossing gesture with her hand. "No, it was new, it just wasn't working out. There's something about Kerry that I want to capture, but I can't get a handle on it." She turned to look at him. "She's got an innocent quality about her, a sweetness, and that's fine, but there's something really interesting running under that. Something with a real edge. And that's what I want to capture with a lyric—the tension between the two."
"You think she's tense?"
"Hello? Where were you all day? She hides them well, but she's got deep worries, that one. Mysteries banging around inside her."
"Like the business with the piano."
"No." She drew the word out. "Well, maybe that's part of it, but it's more than her pretending she can't play. Which reminds me: I'm proud of you."
"What for?"
"You didn't ask her about the piano once."
"For this you're proud?"
"Well, you know how you can get."
He aimed a frown at her that got lost in the dark. "What's that supposed to mean?" he asked, looking out onto the street again.
"Sometimes you don't want to let a thing go."
"Some people consider tenaciousness an admirable character trait."
Annie nodded. "And some people just think it's pig-eyed stubborn." When he glanced over at her, she smiled, adding, "Go figure."
All Rory could do was shake his head. Annie was impossible about some things.
"Listen," she said suddenly.
For a moment he didn't know what she was referring to, then he heard it, too, a slow flap of wings from somewhere up above.
"Crow girl," she said. "Coming home to roost."
Remembering how she'd been teasing Kerry earlier that afternoon, Rory added, "Or maybe it's Chloë."
Annie seemed to give this a moment of serious consideration, then shook her head. "Nope. Definitely a crow. A raven would sound different." She glanced at him. "Bigger wings."
Rory turned to look at her, searching for the smile, but not finding it.
"So what're you saying?" he asked. "That Chloë's a raven?"
Finally Annie laughed, letting him know she was only making mischief again. "Sure," she said. "Why not? We can't all be crow girls, hiding our wings under our skin."
Only now it was Rory who couldn't take it as a joke. Instead he found himself remembering something Lily had said to him on the phone the other night.
The girls that rescued us were like birds …
"You know Jack," he began.
"Everybody knows Jack, don't they?"
"What do you think of those stories he tells?"
"You're not looking for the flip response here, are you?" Annie said, her voice going serious.
Rory shook his head. "Are his crow girls our crow girls?"
"What you're really asking is, are the stories he tells true."
"I suppose."
"They're true for him. I know," she added before he could say anything, "that sounds like I'm being flippant again, but I'm not. You must know this from your own writing—Jack's a storyteller; he tells the truth with lies. So the details aren't necessarily true, but what he's talking about is."
"So when he's laying on some tall tale about animal people and things like that, he's just being metaphorical."
"I wouldn't go so far."
"But—"
"Look," Annie said. "What if time's not linear, the way people think it is? What if the past, present and future are all going on at the same time, only they're separated by—oh, I don't know—a kind of gauze or something. And maybe there are people who can see through that gauze."
Rory smiled. "That would explain ghosts and fortune-telling," he said, going along with her.
"And maybe it also explains how someone like Jack can tell stories about the long ago as if they were right now—as if they were still happening. He's seeing through the gauze."
Sure, why not? Rory thought. But first you had to buy into the idea of time all happening at the same time, and that took a far greater leap of faith than he was able to muster. What Lily had told him was strange enough.
"So do you believe this?" he asked.
She shrugged. "I don't know. I do know that the gardens of the first lands are still lying there, right under the skin of the world—pulsing the way our heartbeat drums under our own skin. And I believe that there's a connectedness between everything that gives some people a deep and abiding affinity to a certain kind of place or creature."
"Like totems?"
"Maybe. Or maybe something even more personal—something that's impossible to articulate with the vocabulary we have at that moment."
"This is too weird."
Annie shrugged. "What can I say? It's getting late, the stars are out. Once the sun sets, I tend to embrace whatever wild spirits are running around in the darkness, talking away to each other. I leave the logic of streets and pavement and cars and tall buildings behind and buy into the old magics that they're whispering about. Sometimes those little mysteries and bits of wisdom stick to the bones of my head and I carry them right out into the sunlight again. They're like Jack's stories, true and not true, all at the same time. They don't exactly shape my life, but they certainly color it." She glanced at him. "I wouldn't like to live in a world where everything's as cut-and-dried as most people think it is."
"I don't think you ever have to be afraid of that," Rory told her.
She shook her head. "It's much easier to forget. It's much easier to buy into linear time and what you see is what you get. That's one of the things that makes Jack's stories so important—at least for me. They remind me of who I am. Of what else is out there."
They seemed to be having two conversations, Rory thought, and one of them went down into that place that Annie had described a few moments ago, the place where you needed a special vocabulary to understand what was being said. He didn't have those words. He didn't even have a dictionary to look them up in.
This had happened before. They'd be talking, and it could be about the most mundane thing—a new CD, the weather, a person walking down the street ahead of them—and he'd suddenly get the impression that there was another conversation taking place on the periphery of the one they were having, that she was telling him something that he was too obtuse, or maybe simply too naive, to properly understand.
And now it was happening again. The difference, this time, was that what had set off this feeling in him was something that was already inexplicable by itself.
"They've never gotten any older," he said. "The crow girls, I mean. In all the time I've known them. I've never really thought about it, but this morning I was paying attention to it. They're, like, thirteen, fourteen. No older."
Annie didn't say anything.
"But you see them different," he said. "Maybe everybody sees them different."
"Maybe they do."
"But how's that possible?"
"Take a look around you," Annie said. "When you really look at the world you have to wonder how any of it's possible."
"I'm not talking about that sort of thing."
"I know," she said. "So what did you want to know about them?"
Everything, Rory thought, but he settled for, "How do they fit with those stories of Jack's? Was it his stories that got you to call them the crow girls, or are they actually the ones in his stories?"
"I can't remember who first came up with that name for them," Annie said. "It was a long time ago."
"Okay. Then how about this: Are they ordinary girls, or something more than that? Something …" He hesitated over the word. "Supernatural."
Annie sighed. "You're going to think I'm being way unhelpful," she said, "but I think that's the kind of thing that each of us has to decide for ourselves."
He waited for her to elaborate, but she fell silent.
"You're right," he said after a few moments. "That doesn't help me at all."
Annie shifted her position on the bench. She turned to face him, knees pulled up to her chin.
"Everybody in the Rookery is a bit different—a bit strange," she said. "But that's never bothered you before."
"Maida and Zia don't live in the house with us."
"No, they live—"
"In a tree in our backyard." Rory sighed. "Unless that's another metaphor that I'm not picking up on."
Annie smiled. "You'd have to ask them."
Like he hadn't
a hundred times before, but the crow girls were adept at turning aside questions they didn't feel like answering.
"That's never done me any good," he said.
"So why the intense interest now?" Annie wanted to know.
He didn't feel he could discuss Lily's experience from the other night. It was for Lily to decide who could know about it.
"I just find it eerie," he said. "Especially how, if I don't concentrate, it slips away on me. I mean, this business is seriously strange, but if I don't keep it in my mind, it takes on a dreamlike quality. It would be so easy to forget."
"That's the problem with mystery and magic—they're hard to sustain."
"You know this from experience?" Rory had to ask.
Annie smiled. "Why do you think I listen to Jack's stories as much as I do?"
"But—"
"Let me give you a piece of advice: Try to approach things without preconceived ideas, without supposing you already know everything there is to know about them. Get that trick down and you'll be surprised at what's really all around you."
Later, Annie went back upstairs. Rory sat awhile longer, watching the street, hoping Maida or Zia would drop down from one of the oaks so he could ask one of them what it all meant, ask them before the sun stole away the stars and the dark and the questions rolling around inside his head that were so hard to hold on to. But no one joined him on the porch and all he could do was try to figure out what Annie had meant about not approaching things with preconceived ideas.
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