Someplace to Be Flying

by Charles de Lint

  "I don't know anymore," I say. "I don't know that the stories do any good. We're all so good at hurting each other, even when we mean well. Even when we know the stories."

  "There's a big difference between doing something wrong by accident and doing it on purpose," Annie tells me. "And how're people going to know it, unless someone tells them the stories?"

  I'm thinking she just doesn't understand.

  "Talk to me, Jack."

  But then I remember what not giving Nettie my story got us.

  "Sorrow halved, Jack," she says. "When you share it. Remember that? It's something else you told me."

  I remember Chloë pointing at Raven one time and reminding me how we had two choices. We can carry on, or we can go away, withdraw from the world like Raven has, and that doesn't do anybody any good. I realize then that what I'm letting happen to me is just another way of going away.

  I open my mouth to speak, but the words won't come. I'm thinking of my Nettie and tears flood my eyes. My throat gets so thick it's like that stone of grief is trying to rise up it. I try to close it all down, to go away, to embrace the cold—this is too raw; this hurts too much—but Annie won't let me. She puts her arms around me and draws my head down onto her shoulder. She doesn't make like it's going to get better, doesn't promise me anything, but just her being there's enough.

  Sorrow shared.

  It's a long while before I can find my voice. After a time we end up lying together on that narrow bed of mine, she's holding me, and I'm talking, I'm telling her the whole sorry tale, and it's while I'm telling it that I remember the promise I made Nettie.

  All that killing I did killed something in me, but I can see a glimmer of it shining bright when I'm talking. It's way off in the dark, flickering and calling to me, but I know the way to chase it isn't to go away like Raven did, but to carry on. I sit up and swing my feet to the floor.

  "I've got to find that girl," I say, my voice a hoarse whisper.

  Annie sits up beside me. "You can't do that by dying."

  "I'm not dying."

  "Not anymore you're not," Annie tells me and then she walks me out of that place.

  I hear later that the crow girls came by and left a changeling in my place—some kind of jackdaw man they put together out of twigs and mud and moss and things. Dressed it up in my prison clothes and left it on the bed. It wasn't made to last long, but then it didn't need to. It only had to stay of a piece for as long as it took the guards to walk it down that long hall on death row and execute it. Long enough for them to dig a hole for it and then throw it in.

  By the time the gravediggers had that makeshift man covered up with dirt, it was already turning back into whatever it was the girls had made it out of and I was long gone, walking the piney wood hills around the Bean farm, looking for that daughter of Nettie's and mine that never got herself born.

  2.

  Hazard//Long Beach, Spring, 1984

  I spend that winter in the hills around Hazard, but I have no more luck finding the lost girl than Nettie did. I have more to go on in my search than Nettie ever had, access to secret places she never knew existed, long views of the winter woods from high up in those frosty skies, but it doesn't help. I find every hidden fold in the fabric of those hills and check it out, once, twice, a dozen times, just to be sure. I fly over more square miles of wooded hills than you can imagine.

  There's no gossip about her the way there was for my little wild fox girl that summer we first met. If the lost girl was ever here, she didn't leave any trace behind her. Nothing. She's got less presence than a ghost, less substance than a memory—though Lord knows there's plenty of them here for me.

  I have help from time to time, but nobody's got a reason to stick with it the way I do. When the months go by, nobody tries to talk me out of it, nobody tries to tell me that I did my best and it's time to give it up now. I guess they figure it's better to have Jack out walking these hills on a fruitless quest than stepping out of the world the way Raven did. At least this way nobody's got to care for me the way Chloë looks after him.

  There are Morgans back in Freakwater Hollow, but they keep their distance from me, and I keep mine from them. I can't afford to step back into that place where that killing frenzy took me last year. It's not just because being there would shut me away from my search. It's that it's wrong. I don't want to be the person I'd be if I let myself go there again. That's something I know I can't repeat because if I did, I know this time I'd never get back again.

  I guess it's close on the end of April when I get the notion to see how the twin that got born is doing, thinking maybe I can find some clue by looking at her, listening in on her life, watching over her.

  I fly down from spring in the Kickaha Hills north of Newford to that piece of oceanfront land in California that you humans have claimed from the desert and made your own.

  There's no accounting for what some folks'll do. You'll take a perfectly good section of land and ooh and ah over just how pristine and untouched it is, but then you have to change it out of all recognition before you can be comfortable in it. I've seen you do it over and over again, and it makes no more sense to me now than it did when your ancestors were first chipping away at rocks and cutting down the woods to build themselves their shelters. You never build just what you need, the way we would a nest. You've got to spread out as far as you can, cut down a whole forest, irrigate a whole desert, just to make sure that you won't accidentally stumble upon a place that's still in its natural state.

  Long Beach isn't much different. Worse than some, not so bad as others. Mind you, I remember what it was like before you got to it and there's no comparison. 'Course I got my own bias, same as you. But living in an environment I can't control doesn't scare me. I'm partial to the surprises.

  Doesn't take me too long to track down the Madan household. Maybe Kerry isn't bearing the Bean name, but I wasn't looking by names. I was going by smell and she's got so much of the blood in her—canid and corbae—that she's not hard to find at all.

  I take to sitting on her windowsill while she's sleeping, just looking at the marvel she is. We made that girl, I think—me and Nettie, except Nettie did all the real work. But sometimes when I look at her, I have to ask myself, what for?

  Kerry doesn't seem to have what I'd call a good life. No woods to run in. No real friends, human or blood. Not much affection from either Lilah or her husband. They don't treat her mean. They make sure she gets a good schooling, learns her manners, how to carry herself. But they don't give her any love, either, and that's hard for a child to bear. Even those plants you folks have transplanted to this desert need their water. They need some tenderness and caring. A child's no different. You can't put her in a desert and expect her to flourish without her parents' love.

  But Lilah's her half sister, not her real mother, and Stephen's not really any relation at all. Kerry doesn't know it, but her mother's dead and her father's a no-account jackdaw who follows her around when she leaves the house and sits perched on her windowsill at night, sitting there looking in at her and wishing with all his heart that things could be different.

  But they're not. I can't do much to help Kerry—it's not like she'd have any better of a life wandering around homeless with me—and I have no more luck finding her lost twin sister here than I did back in the hills around Hazard. I toy with the idea of taking on a young boy's shape and finding some natural way to meet Kerry, just so's she can at least have herself one friend, but all I've got to do is think how that worked out with her mammy and the dark cold comes slipping back into my heart, the grief rears up in my chest, and I have to fly off, hard and fast, fly for miles until I burn off enough of that grief and pain to at least pretend I'm all of a piece.

  Finally I realize there's nothing more I can do here. I can't help Kerry, can't find her sister, and I'm ready to take the search back to Hazard again. I sit there on the windowsill for one last time, looking in, drinking in the sight of that sleeping child, a
nd then I see her, the missing twin. She's lying there inside of Kerry, a little bundle of bones and hair, all curled up, sleeping under Kerry's skin.

  I even know her name. Katy.

  It comes to me as clear as though someone's whispered it in my ear. The lost girl's name is Katy and she was never lost at all. She just got herself caught up under the skin of her sister and she's too deep asleep to make it out into the world on her own now.

  I study the pair of them for a long time, but I can't see a way clear to getting her out without hurting Kerry in the process. But if I can't do it, there's those that can. They just need a nudge to get them looking in the right place.

  Flying around to the other side of the house, I perch on Lilah and Stephen's windowsill and put the idea of Kerry needing a checkup at the doctor's office into their minds. Once I get that done, I make sure that doctor twigs to what's sleeping under Kerry's skin. They start in on the X rays, admit Kerry into the hospital; she goes into the surgery theater, but it doesn't work out like I hoped. Katy's not sleeping—it must have been an echo of Kerry's heartbeat I heard and mistook for hers. The doctor gets her out all right, and they stitch Kerry up again, do a beautiful job of it, except the lost girl doesn't get born, she doesn't get to live. The poor little thing's born dead, if you can still call it being born when all they do is take out the fossilized pieces of her that have been hiding there inside her sister for the past twelve years.

  Another piece of my heart gets broke when I sneak in and collect that little bundle of bones and hair. I wrap it up in a scarf and put it in the inside pocket of my duster, where it can lie against my heart, and then I take it back up to Hazard, out to that field of grace, where I bury the unborn child beside her mammy, under the watchful presence of that old gray stone.

  I don't go back to see Kerry. I couldn't do anything for her before and I still can't do anything for her now.

  Some things don't change, I guess. I'm never going to be of much use to anyone in that family and I realize the best thing I can do is just stay out of the surviving child's life. I only wish I'd done that before I ever met my little wild fox girl. The idea of never having known Nettie hurts, but I'd rather suffer that and a thousand more powerful hurts, if it could have meant that Nettie wouldn't have had to endure what she did. If it could have meant that she'd still be alive.

  I could've let myself go then, just let that store of grief I carry in me bear me down, but I've taken on the responsibility of my stories again, doing my best to keep history alive so that we don't repeat our mistakes. I end up moving down to Newford, take to living in that old school bus of mine near the junkyard, walking the streets, collecting stories, telling them to whoever will listen.

  And time goes by.

  3.

  Newford, Fall, 1995

  Retrospect's a wonderful thing. All those things we could have, would have, should have done, had we only known. Except we didn't. And maybe some things just have to play out the way they do—which isn't exactly a comforting thought. It calls up too many questions I can't answer. All I know for sure is that by the middle of the eighties it looks like the hard times fate has in store for the Bean family haven't ended with Nettie dying.

  Chloë's lawyer managed to keep Nettie out of the institution, but some fifteen years or so later, none of us were there to stop Lilah and her husband from putting Nettie's daughter away. And once Kerry's inside, there's not a damn thing we can do to get her out again because Kerry won't let go of her own obsession, and we can't prove it's true.

  Hell, Katy showing up the way she does isn't something we can explain any better than you can.

  None of us even knew that Katy had survived until Paul was out on the West Coast a couple of years after she'd been "born"—that'd be late in '85, when Kerry had already been committed. Chloë had asked him to check in on the Madans to see how Kerry was doing and he came back with a story that actually takes Chloë out of the Rookery and down to my school bus.

  "You told me she was dead, Jack," Chloë says, sitting there at the kitchen table, looking across at me.

  We've already had us some snow, and the winds are strong outside the bus today, blowing trash across the empty lots, building drifts wherever the snow can get some purchase. Winter's settling in. I have my woodstove stoked with a kettle set on top, boiling some water for tea. I forget about the water when I hear what Chloë has to say. All I can do is stare at her. "Your water is boiling," she says.

  I get up and pour it over the tea bags in the teapot, bring the pot to the table, set out honey and milk, going through the motions mechanically because I can't think straight. For a long time I just can't get my head around what she's just told me.

  "She was dead," I say finally. "I buried that little bundle of bones and hair up in Hazard, right beside her mammy."

  "So what're we dealing with here?" Chloë asks. "A spirit? A ghost?" You might think this strange, but we don't have much more experience with spirits and ghosts than you do, except for how you put those names to us sometimes. So Katy's about as much of a mystery to us as she is to you, the difference being we're a little more open-minded about that kind of thing.

  "Damned if I know," I tell her. "But I'm going to find out."

  A gust of wind shakes the bus, rattling the windows.

  "What about Kerry?" I ask. "Can you get her out?"

  Chloë shakes her head.

  "I could get her out," I say.

  "I'm sure you could," Chloë says. "But then what? We're discussing a thirteen-year-old girl here, Jack."

  I know where she's going with this and I can see her point. I've already been through all of this in my own head when I was down there in Long Beach myself and made the decision to stay out of Kerry's life. I'd realized then that I'd brought enough grief to the Beans and wasn't prepared to bring any more. But that was before she'd been institutionalized. "I'm not standing by again," I say. "Doing nothing."

  "I'm not saying you should," Chloë tells me. "But we have to consider the other child now. What's going to happen to her with nobody even believing she exists?"

  I find myself nodding. It makes sense that she'd be even more in need of my help. And Katy was the one Nettie made me promise to look out for.

  "But I'll look in on Kerry," I say. "Make sure they're not mistreating her."

  Chloë's got no argument with that.

  I head down the next day.

  First thing I do is stop by that Baumert Hospital and check in on Kerry. From how it looks to me, she seems to be doing okay, though you have to understand that I'm not exactly an expert when it comes to these kinds of places. When I see her so calm, I don't realize they've medicated all the fire out of her. I see the doctor talking so nicely to her and I don't know that she's being paid under the table to keep Kerry in that medicated state. I find myself thinking that maybe she's better off here, instead of living with Lilah and her husband. Maybe she'll have a better chance to grow up happy, out of their mean-spirited influence.

  So I leave Kerry in that place and I go looking for her sister. I still don't know what Katy is—spirit or ghost or something else entirely that we haven't got a name for yet—but she has the same canid-corbae smell that Kerry does and she's not that hard to track. I find her a little farther south, down the coast in Seal Beach. She's sitting on the low stone wall of that parking lot at the end of Main Street, down by the pier, watching the tide move the water in and out. Red-haired and brown-skinned with those sky-blue eyes she got from her mother.

  She pays no more attention to my approach than she does to anybody else on the beach. I'm thinking she's deep in thought until I sit down beside her and say hello. She looks so startled I think maybe I've left a few jackdaw feathers growing out of my forehead when I shucked my corbae skin, only then I remember Paul saying she's got our knack of not being seen unless she wants to be. I guess she doesn't realize the trick only works with humans.

  But while I surprised her, she's quick to compose herself.

/>   "Who're you?" she asks.

  "Nobody," I say with a shrug. "Just some old jackdaw needing a place to set for a few minutes. You mind if I share this piece of wall with you?"

  She shakes her head. "Go ahead. There's lots of room." She waits a beat before she has to ask, "What do you mean by 'jackdaw'?"

  "It's what I am. Corbae. You got a piece of the first people in you, too—bit of corbae, some fox blood. It's why I came up and said hello. Be pretty rude of me not to pass a little time with my kin when I see one of them sitting on her own."

  She gives me a look like she's not sure if I'm putting her on or what.

  "Who're these first people?" she asks.

  "You know—we got here before the humans, when Raven and the crow girls pulled the long ago out of the medicine lands and set the world to wheeling through the sky."

  She gives a slow shake of her head, still unsure about where I'm coming from, but interested now, which is what I'm aiming for.

  "I have no idea what you're talking about," she says.

  So I tell her the story, the two of us sitting there in the California sun, watching the waves, nobody looking at us, nobody paying any attention to us at all. To either of us. I see her note that, too.

  "Is that true?" she asks, the way everybody does.

  "Pretty much," I tell her.

  "And I'm one of them?"

  I give her a nod. "The blood's not exactly first generation, but you can't mistake it."

  "I don't remember any of that stuff you're talking about."

  "That's because you weren't there," I tell her. "Leastways, I don't remember you being there. You got yourself born a little further down the road."