Very Best of Charles de Lint, The (37 page)

“I’ll try,” she said into the phone.

They said their goodbyes and Heather slowly cradled the receiver.

“Who was that, Mom?” Casey asked.

Heather looked out the window. The snow was still falling, muffling the world. Covering its complexities with a blanket as innocent as the hope she saw in her daughters’ eyes.

“Jilly,” she said. She took a deep breath, then smiled at them. “She was calling to tell me that today really is a snow day.”

The happiness that flowered on their faces helped ease the tightness in her chest. The grey landscape waiting for her there didn’t go away, but for some reason, it felt less profound. She wasn’t even worried about what her boss would say when she called to tell him she wouldn’t be in today.

* * *

Crow girls can move like ghosts. They’ll slip into your house when you’re not home, sometimes when you’re only sleeping, go walking spirit-soft through your rooms and hallways, sit in your favourite chair, help themselves to cookies and beer, borrow a trinket or two which they’ll mean to return and usually do. It’s not break and enter so much as simple curiosity. They’re worse than cats.

Privacy isn’t in their nature. They don’t seek it and barely understand the concept. Personal property is even more alien. The idea of ownership—that one can lay proprietary claim to a piece of land, an object, another person or creature—doesn’t even register.

“Whatcha looking at?” Zia asks.

They don’t know whose house they’re in. Walking along on the street, trying to catch snowflakes on their tongues, one or the other of them suddenly got the urge to come inside. Upstairs, the family sleeps.

Maida shows her the photo album. “Look,” she says. “It’s the same people, but they keep changing. See, here’s she’s a baby, then she’s a little girl, then a teenager.”

“Everything changes,” Zia says. “Even we get old. Look at Crazy Crow.”

“But it happens so fast with them.”

Zia sits down beside her and they pore over the pictures, munching on apples they found earlier in a cold cellar in the basement.

Upstairs, a father wakes in his bed. He stares at the ceiling, wondering what woke him. Nervous energy crackles inside him like static electricity, a sudden spill of adrenaline, but he doesn’t know why. He gets up and checks the children’s rooms. They’re both asleep. He listens for intruders, but the house is silent.

Stepping back into the hall, he walks to the head of the stairs and looks down. He thinks he sees something in the gloom, two dark-haired girls sitting on the sofa, looking through a photo album. Their gazes lift to meet his and hold it. The next thing he knows, he’s on the sofa himself, holding the photo album in his hand. There are no strange girls sitting there with him. The house seems quieter than it’s ever been, as though the fridge, the furnace and every clock the family owns are holding their breath along with him.

He sets the album down on the coffee table, walks slowly back up the stairs and returns to his bed. He feels like a stranger, misplaced. He doesn’t know this room, doesn’t know the woman beside him. All he can think about is the first girl he ever loved and his heart swells with a bittersweet sorrow. An ache pushes against his ribs, makes it almost impossible to breathe.

What if, what if…

He turns on his side and looks at his wife. For one moment her face blurs, becomes a morphing image that encompasses both her features and those of his first true love. For one moment it seems as though anything is possible, that for all these years he could have been married to another woman, to that girl who first held, then unwittingly, broke his heart.

“No,” he says.

His wife stirs, her features her own again. She blinks sleepily at him.

“Wha…?” she mumbles.

He holds her close, heartbeat drumming, more in love with her for being who she is than he has ever been before.

Outside, the crow girls are lying on their backs, making snow angels on his lawn, scissoring their arms and legs, shaping skirts and wings. They break their apple cores in two and give their angels eyes, then run off down the street, holding hands. The snow drifts are undisturbed by their weight. It’s as though they, too, like the angels they’ve just made, have wings.

* * *

“This is so cool,” Casey tells her mother. “It really feels like Christmas. I mean, not like Christmases we’ve had, but, you know, like really being part of Christmas.”

Heather nods. She’s glad she brought the girls down to the soup kitchen to help Jilly and her friends serve a Christmas dinner to those less fortunate than themselves. She’s been worried about how her daughters would take the break from tradition, but then realized, with Peter gone, tradition is already broken. Better to begin all over again.

The girls had been dubious when she first broached the subject with them— “I don’t want to spend Christmas with
losers
,” had been Casey’s first comment. Heather hadn’t argued with her. All she’d said was, “I want you to think about what you just said.”

Casey’s response had been a sullen look—there were more and more of these lately—but Heather knew her own daughter well enough. Casey had stomped off to her room, but then come back half an hour later and helped her explain to Janice why it might not be the worst idea in the world.

She watches them now, Casey having rejoined her sister where they are playing with the homeless children, and knows a swell of pride. They’re such good kids, she thinks as she takes another sip of her cider. After a couple of hours serving coffee, tea and hot cider, she’d really needed to get off her feet for a moment.

“Got something for you,” Jilly says, sitting down on the bench beside her.

Heather accepts the small, brightly-wrapped parcel with reluctance. “I thought we said we weren’t doing Christmas presents.”

“It’s not really a Christmas present. It’s more an everyday sort of a present that I just happen to be giving you today.”

“Right.”

“So aren’t you going to open it?”

Heather peels back the paper and opens the small box. Inside, nestled in a piece of folded Kleenex, are two small silver earrings cast in the shapes of crows. Heather lifts her gaze.

“They’re beautiful.”

“Got them at the craft show from a local jeweler. Rory Crowther. See, his name’s on the card in the bottom of the box. They’re to remind you—”

Heather smiles. “Of crow girls?”

“Partly. But more to remember that this—” Jilly waves a hand that could be taking in the basement of St. Vincent’s, could be taking in the whole world. “It’s not all we get. There’s more. We can’t always see it, but it’s there.”

For a moment, Heather thinks she sees two dark-haired slim figures standing on the far side of the basement, but when she looks more closely they’re only a baglady and Geordie’s friend Tanya, talking.

For a moment, she thinks she hears the sound of wings, but it’s only the murmur of conversation. Probably.

What she knows for sure is that the grey landscape inside her chest is shrinking a little more, every day.

“Thank you,” she says.

She isn’t sure if she’s speaking to Jilly or to crow girls she’s only ever seen once, but whose presence keeps echoing through her life. Her new life. It isn’t necessarily a better one. Not yet. But at least it’s on the way up from wherever she’d been going, not down into a darker despair.

“Here,” Jilly says. “Let me help you put them on.”

Birds

Isn’t it wonderful? The world scans.

—Nancy Willard, from “Looking for Mr. Ames”

1

When her head is full of birds, anything is possible. She can understand the slow language of the trees, the song of running water, the whispering gossip of the wind. The conversation of the birds fills her until she doesn’t even think to remember what it was like before she could understand them. But sooner or later, the birds go away, one by one, find new nests, new places to fly. It’s not that they tire of her; it’s simply not in their nature to tarry for too long.

But she misses them. Misses their company, the flutter of wings inside her head and their trilling conversations. Misses the possibilities. The magic.

To call them back she has to approach them as a bride. Dressed in white, with something old and something new, something borrowed and something blue. And a word. A new word, from another’s dream. A word that has never been heard before.

2

Katja Faro was out later than she thought safe, at least for this part of town and at this time of night, the minute hand of her old-fashioned wristwatch steadily climbing up the last quarter of her watch face to count the hour. Three A.M. That late.

From early evening until the clubs close, Gracie Street is a jumbled clutter of people, looking for action, looking for gratification, or just out and about, hanging, gossiping with their friends. There’s always something happening, from Lee Street all the way across to Williamson, but tag on a few more hours and clubland becomes a frontier. The lights advertising the various cafés, clubs and bars begin to flicker and go out, their patrons and staff have all gone home, and the only people out on the streets are a few stragglers, such as Katja tonight, and the predators.

Purple combat boots scuffing on the pavement, Katja felt adrift on the empty street. It seemed like only moments ago she’d been secure in the middle of good conversation, laughter and espressos; then someone remarked on the time, the café was closing and suddenly she was out here, on the street, by herself, finding her own way home. She held her jean jacket closed at her throat—the buttons had come off, one by one, and she kept forgetting to replace them—and listened to the swish of her long flowered skirt, the sound of her boots on the pavement. Listened as well for other footsteps and prayed for a cab to come by.

She was paying so much attention to what might be lurking behind the shadowed mouths of the alleyways that she almost didn’t notice the slight figure curled up in the doorway of the pawn shop on her right. The sight made her pause. She glanced up and down the street before crouching down in the doorway. The figure’s features were in shadow, the small body outlined under what looked like a dirty white sheet, or a shawl. By its shape Katja could tell it wasn’t a boy.

“Hey, are you okay?” she asked.

When there was no response, she touched the girl’s shoulder and repeated her question. Large pale eyes flickered open, their gaze settling on Katja. The girl woke like a cat, immediately aware of everything around her. Her black hair hung about her face in a tangle. Unlike most street people, she had a sweet smell, like a field of clover, or a potpourri of dried rosehips and herbs, gathered in a glass bowl.

“What makes you think I’m not okay?” the girl asked.

Katja pushed the fall of her own dark hair back from her brow and settled back on her heels.

“Well, for one thing,” she said, “you’re lying here in a doorway, on a bed of what looks like old newspapers. It’s not exactly the kind of place people pick to sleep in if they’ve got a choice.”

She glanced up and down the street again as she spoke, still wary of her surroundings and their possible danger, still hoping to see a cab.

“I’m okay,” the girl told her.

“Yeah, right.”

“No, really.”

Katja had to smile. She wasn’t so old that she’d forgotten what it felt like to be in her late teens and immortal. Remembering, looking at this slight girl with her dark hair and strangely pale eyes, she got this odd urge to take in a stray the way that Angel and Jilly often did. She wasn’t sure why. She liked to think that she had as much sympathy as the next person, but normally it was hard to muster much of it at this time of night. Normally she was thinking too much about what terrors the night might hold for her to consider playing the Good Samaritan. But this girl looked so young….

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Teresa. Teresa Lewis.”

Katja offered her hand as she introduced herself.

Teresa laughed. “Welcome to my home,” she said and shook Katja’s hand.

“This a regular squat?” Katja asked. Nervous as she was at being out so late, she couldn’t imagine actually sleeping in a place like this on a regular basis.

“No,” Teresa said. “I meant the street.”

Katja sighed. Immortal. “Look. I don’t have that big a place, but there’s room on my couch if you want to crash.”

Teresa gave her a considering look.

“Well, I know it’s not the Harbour Ritz,” Katja began.

“It’s not that,” Teresa told her. “It’s just that you don’t know me at all. I could be loco, for all you know. Get to your place and rob you….”

“I’ve got a big family,” Katja told her. “They’d track you down and take it out of your skin.”

Teresa laughed again. It was like they were meeting at a party somewhere, Katja thought, drinks in hand, no worries, instead of on Gracie Street at three A.M.

“I’m serious,” she said. “I’ve got the room.”

Teresa’s laughter trailed off. Her pale gaze settled on Katja’s features.

“Do you believe in magic?” she asked.

“Say what?”

“Magic. Do you believe in it?”

Katja blinked. She waited for the punch line, but when it didn’t come, she said, “Well, I’m not sure. My friend Jilly sure does—though maybe magic’s not quite the right word. It’s more like she believes there’s more to this world than we can always see or understand. She sees things….”

Katja caught herself. How did we get into this? she thought. She wanted to change the subject, she wanted to get off the street before some homeboys showed up with all the wrong ideas in mind, but the steady weight of Teresa’s intense gaze wouldn’t let her go.

“Anyway,” Katja said, “I guess you could say Jilly does. Believes in magic, I mean. Sees things.”

“But what about you? Have you seen things?”

Katja shook her head. “Only ‘old, unhappy, far-off things, and battles long ago,’” she said. “Wordsworth,” she added, placing the quote when Teresa raised her eyebrows in a question.

“Then I guess you couldn’t understand,” Teresa told her. “See, the reason I’m out here like this is that I’m looking for a word.”