Muse and Reverie
Charles de Lint
A Tom Doherty Associates Book New York

The city, characters, and events to be found in these pages are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

MUSE AND REVERIE

Copyright © 2009 by Charles de Lint

All rights reserved.

A Tor Book Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC 175 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10010

www.tor-forge .com

Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

De Lint, Charles, 1951– Muse and reverie / Charles de Lint. — 1st ed.

p. cm. “A Tom Doherty Associates book.” ISBN 978-0-7653-2340-8

1. Newford (Imaginary place)—Fiction. 2. City and town life—

Fiction. 3. Fantasy fiction, Canadian. I. Title. PR9199.3. D357M87 2009 813'.54—dc22

2009034713

First Edition: December 2009

Printed in the United States of America

0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Copyright Ac know ledg ments

“Somewhere in My Mind There Is a Painting Box” first appeared in The Green Man: Tales from the Mythic Forest, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling; Viking Books, 2002. Copyright © 2002 by Charles de Lint.

“Refinerytown” first appeared as a limited edition chapbook published by Triskell Press, 2001. Copyright © 2001 by Charles de Lint.

“A Crow Girls’ Christmas” first appeared online at www .charlesdelint .com, 2001. Copyright © 2001 by Charles de Lint and MaryAnn Harris.

“Dark Eyes, Faith, and Devotion” first appeared in Magic Tails, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Janet Pack; DAW Books, 2005. Copyright © 2005 by Charles de Lint.

“Riding Shotgun” first appeared in Flights, edited by Al Sarrantonio; Roc Books, 2003. Copyright © 2003 by Charles de Lint.

“Sweet Forget- Me- Not” first appeared as a limited edition chapbook published by Triskell Press, 2002. Copyright © 2002 by Charles de Lint.

“That Was Radio Clash” first appeared in Taverns of the Dead, edited by Kealan Patrick Burke; Cemetery Dance, 2004. Copyright © 2004 by Charles de Lint.

“The Butter Spirit’s Tithe” first appeared in Emerald Magic: Great Tales of Irish Fantasy, edited by Andrew M. Greeley; Tor, 2004. Copyright © 2004 by Charles de Lint.

“Da Slockit Light” first appeared as a limited edition chapbook published by Triskell Press, 2003. Copyright © 2003 by Charles de Lint.

“The Hour Before Dawn” first appeared in The Hour Before Dawn and Two Other Stories from Newford; Subterranean Press, 2005. Copyright © 2005 by Charles de Lint.

“Newford Spook Squad” first appeared in Hellboy: Odder Jobs, edited by Christopher Golden; Dark Horse Comics, 2004. Copyright © 2004 by Charles de Lint. Hellboy characters created by Mike Mignola and used by permission.

“In Sight” first appeared in Maiden, Matron, Crone, edited by Kerrie Hughes and Martin H. Greenberg; DAW Books, 2005. Copyright © 2005 by Charles de Lint.

“The World in a Box” first appeared as a limited edition chapbook published by Triskell Press, 2004. Copyright © 2004 by Charles de Lint.

This volume of stories goes out to the late Johnny Cash & Joe Strummer, two musicians who are much missed but whose music continues to enrich my life.
Contents
Author’s Note 11 Somewhere in My Mind There Is a Painting Box 19 Refinerytown 50 A Crow Girls’ Christmas 71 Dark Eyes, Faith, and Devotion 80 Riding Shotgun 99 Sweet Forget- Me- Not 144 That Was Radio Clash 169 The Butter Spirit’s Tithe 189 Da Slockit Light 223 The Hour Before Dawn 264 Newford Spook Squad 286 In Sight 309 The World in a Box 328
Author’s Note

Five collections in now, I’m at a bit of a loss as to what to say about these stories set in Newford because I’m sure I’ve said all there is to say in previous introductions. But one thing I can do is thank you, the readers, for your continued support over the years.

I’m sure the fact that the previous four collections are all still in print is not unique to me (there must be collections by other authors with long shelf lives), but it does owe everything to your going out and buying them, and talking them up to your friends. As does the fact that in these trying economic times Tor is publishing yet another one—for which I thank Patrick Nielsen Hayden and Tom Doherty, my editor and publisher, respectively. And I would certainly be remiss if I didn’t send a shout- out to all the bookstores that carry them.

But mostly it’s because of you.

That said, I do want to add individual thanks to my wife, MaryAnn, who came up with the title for this collection, as she has for so many of my books. She continues to make astute suggestions, both before and after the stories are written, and busy as her life is with her own work and art, she still finds the time to handle so much of the business side of my career, which lets me concentrate on the writing. This year she gets an added thanks for her persis tence in visiting the Humane Society, which netted us the most recent addition to our family, our pup Johnny Cash.

His boundless energy is a perfect counterpoint to our cat Clare’s regal calm.

Thanks as well to Rodger Turner, who makes me look good on the Web with the site he maintains for me (check out his review/info site at www.sfsite .com), and my agent, Russ Galen, who takes such good care of me in the big world of business.

And of course my appreciation goes out to the individual editors who first commissioned some of these stories: Ellen Datlow, Terri Windling, Martin H. Greenberg, Janet Pack, Al Sarrantonio, Kealan Patrick Burke, Andrew M. Greeley, Christopher Golden, Mike Mignola, and Kerrie Hughes.

I’m taking a break from Newford, but it’s nice to know that the characters can go on about their business in this collection while I move on to other things. And there are enough completed short stories on file for one more collection, so I might well be writing another of these introductions in a year or two.

Until then, take care of each other.

Lastly, some notes on a couple of the stories.

With “Refinerytown” I’ve gone and broken a long- held rule for my writing and put a couple of real people in the story as actual characters. Sharyn November is my Young Adult editor at Viking, a magnificent woman who really does have chicken puppets, though I’ve yet to see them. Nina Kiriki Hoffman is my good pal, a wonderful writer, a talented musician, and a fellow lover of silly things and toys.

They’re here because “Refinerytown” started as a joke at a convention. We kept trying to convince Sharyn to buy the idea as a series of picture books, and the more serious we appeared to be, the more horrified she became. There were others involved in the creation of “Refinerytown,” most prominently Charles Vess.

He didn’t make it in because the story already has a comic book artist in it, but he does get a mention. I don’t even get that.

And you can blame MaryAnn for telling me I should actually write the story. I think she meant the real “Refinerytown,” but I’m leaving that in Mona’s and Nina’s capable hands.

In “Newford Spook Squad”: Special thanks to my pals Dave Russell and Mark Finn for vetting this.

If any of you are on the Internet, come visit my home page at www.charlesdelint .com. I’m also at MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter, so you can drop in and say hello to me there as well.

Charles de Lint

Ottawa, Winter 2009

Take, if you must, this little bag of dreams; Unloose the cord, and they will wrap you round.

—W. B. Yeats, from “Fergus and the Druid”
Muse and Reverie
Somewhere in My Mind There Is a Painting Box

Such a thing to find, so deep in the forest: a painter’s box nested in ferns and a tangle of sprucey- pine roots, almost buried by the leaves and pine needles drifted up against the trunk of the tree. Later, Lily would learn that it was called a pochade box, but for now she sat bouncing lightly on her ankles admiring her find.

It was impossible to say how long the box had been hidden here. The wood panels weren’t rotting, but the hasps were rusted shut and it took her awhile to get them open. She lifted the lid and then, and then...

Treasure.

Stored in the lid, held apart from each other by slots, were three 8×10 wooden panels, each with a painting on it. For all their quick and loose rendering, she had no trouble recognizing the subjects. There was something familiar about them, too—beyond the subject matter that she easily recognized.

The first was of the staircase waterfall where the creek took a sudden tumble before continuing on again at a more level pace. She had to fill in detail from her own memory and imagination, but she knew it was that place.

The second was of a long- deserted homestead up a side valley of the hollow, the tin roof sagging, the rotting walls falling inward. It was nothing like Aunt’s cabin on its sunny slopes, surrounded by wild roses, old beehives, and an apple orchard that she and Aunt were slowly reclaiming from the wild. This was a place that would only get sun from midmorning through the early afternoon, a dark and damp hollow, where the dew never had a chance to burn off completely.

The last one could have been painted anywhere in this forest, but she imagined it had been done down by the creek, looking up a slope into a view of yellow birches, beech and sprucey- pines growing dense and thick as the stars overhead, with a burst of light coming through a break in the canopy.

Lily studied each painting, then carefully set them aside on the ground beside her. There was the hint of another picture on the inside lid itself, but she couldn’t make out what it was supposed to be. Perhaps it was just the artist testing his colours. Looking at it made her feel funny, as though the ground under her had gotten spongy, and she started to sway. She blinked. When she turned her attention to the rest of the box, the feeling went away.

The palette was covered in dried paint that, like the inside lid, almost had the look of a painting itself, and when lifted from the box revealed a compartment underneath. In the bottom of the box were tubes of oil paint, brushes and a palette knife, a small bottle of turpentine, and a rag stained with all the colours the artist had been using.

Lily turned the palette over and there she found what she’d been looking for. An identifying mark. She ran a finger over the letters that spelled out an impossible name.

Milo Johnson.

Treasure.

“Milo Johnson,” Aunt repeated, trying to understand Lily’s excitement. “Should I know that name?”

Lily gave her a “you never pay attention, do you?” look and went to get a book from her bookshelf. She didn’t have many, but those she did have had been read over and over again. The one she brought back to the kitchen table was called The Newford Naturalists: Redefining the Landscape. Opening it to the first artist profiled, she underlined his name with her finger.

Aunt read silently along with her, mouthing the words, then studied the black- and- white photo of Johnson that accompanied the profile.

“I remember seeing him a time or two,” she said. “Tramping through the woods with an old canvas knapsack on his back. But that was a long time ago.”

“It would have to have been.”

Aunt read a little more, then looked up.

“So he’s famous then,” she asked.

“Very. He went painting all through these hills and he’s got pictures in galleries all over the world.”

“Imagine that. And you reckon this is his box?”

Lily nodded.

“Well, we’d better see about returning it to him.”

“We can’t,” Lily told her. “He’s dead. Or at least they say he’s dead. He and Frank Spain went out into the hills on a painting expedition and were never heard from again.”

She flipped towards the back of the book until she came to the smaller section devoted to Spain’s work. Johnson had been the giant among the Newford Naturalists, his bold, dynamic style instantly recognizable, even to those who might not know him by name, while Spain had been one of a group of younger artists that Johnson and his fellow Naturalists had been mentoring. He wasn’t as well known as Johnson or the others, but he’d already been showing the potential to become a leader in his own right before he and Johnson had taken that last fateful trip.

It was all in the book which Lily had practically memorized by now, she’d read it so often.

Ever since Harlene Welch had given it to her a few years ago, Lily had wanted to grow up to be like the Naturalists—especially Johnson. Not to paint exactly the way they did, necessarily, but to have her own individual vision the way that they did. To be able to take the world of her beloved hills and forest and portray it in such a way that others would see it through her eyes, that they would see it in a new way and so understand her love for it and would want to protect it the way that she did.

Aunt considered her endless forays into the woods with pencil and paper in hand a tall step up from her earlier childhood ambition, which was simply to find the fairies she was convinced lived in the woods around them. Lily had pursued them with the same singular focus that she now devoted to her drawings of trees and stones, hillsides and hollows, and the birds and animals that made their homes in the forest.

“That was twenty years ago,” she said, “and their bodies weren’t ever recovered.”

Twenty years ago. Imagine. The box had been lying lost in the woods for all that time. She must have passed by it on a hundred occasions, never noticing it until today when pure chance had it poke a corner up out of its burrow of leaves just as she was coming by.

“Never thought of painting pictures as being something dangerous,” Aunt said.

“Anything can be dangerous,” Lily replied. “That’s what Beau says.”

Aunt nodded. She reached across the table to turn the box towards her.

“So you plan on keeping it?” she asked.

“I guess.”

“He must have kin. Don’t you think it should go to them?”

Lily shook her head. “He was an orphan—just like me. The only people we could give it to would be in the museum, and they’d just stick it away in some drawer somewheres.”

“Even the pictures?”

“Well, probably not them. But the painting box for sure . . .”

Lily hungered to try the paints and brushes she’d found in the box. There was never enough money for her to think of being able to buy either. They lived on what ever they could grow or gather from the woods around them, augmented by the small checks that Aunt’s ex- husband sent every other month or so. So Lily made her brushes with wild grasses, or by crimping locks of her own hair with bits of tin and pliers, attaching them to the end of hardwood sticks. For colour she used anything that came to hand—old coffee grounds and teabags, berries, fine red mud, the hulls of nuts, and onion skins. Some, like the berries, she used as she found them. Others she’d boil up to get their colour. But their faint washes lent only a ghost of colour to her drawings. These paints she’d found would be like going from the gloom of dusk into the bright light of day.

“Well,” Aunt said. “You found it, so I guess you get to decide what you do with it.”

“I guess.”

Finder’s keepers, after all. But she couldn’t help feeling that she was being greedy. That this find of hers—especially the paintings— belonged to everyone, not just some gangly backwoods girl who happened to come upon them while out on a ramble.

“I’ll have to think on it,” she added.

Aunt nodded, then got up to put on the kettle.

The next morning Lily went about her chores. She fed the chickens, sparing a few handfuls of feed for the sparrows and other birds that were waiting expectantly in the trees nearby. She milked the cow and when she was done poured some milk into a saucer for the cats that came out of the woods, purring and winding in between her legs until she set the saucer down. By the time she’d finished weeding the garden and filling the woodbox, it was midmorning.

She packed herself a lunch and stowed it in her shoulder satchel along with some carpenter’s pencils and a pad of sketching paper made from cutting up brown grocery bags and tying them together on one side to make a book.

“Off again, are you?” Aunt asked.

“I’ll be home for dinner.”

“You’re not going to bring that box with you?”

She was tempted. The tubes of paint were rusted shut, but she’d squeezed the thin metal of their bodies and found that the paint inside was still pliable. The brushes were good, too. Milo Johnson, as might be expected of a master paint er, knew to take care of his tools. But much as she wanted to, her using them didn’t seem right. Not yet, anyways.

“Not today,” she told Aunt.

As she left the house she looked up to see a pair of dogs come tearing up the slope toward her. They were the Schaffers’ dogs, Max and Kiki, the one dark brown, the other white with black markings, the pair of them bundles of short- haired energy. The Schaffers lived beside the Welchs, who owned the farm at the end of the trail that ran from the county road to Aunt’s cabin— an hour’s walk through the woods as you followed the creek. Their dogs were a friendly pair, good at not chasing cows or game, and showed up every few days to accompany Lily on her rambles.

The dogs danced around her now as she set off through the orchard. When she got to the Apple Tree Man’s tree— that’s what Aunt called the oldest tree of the orchard— she pulled a biscuit she’d saved from breakfast and set it down at its roots. It was a habit she’d had since she was a little girl— like feeding the birds and the cats while doing her morning chores. Aunt used to tease her about it, telling her what a good provider she was for the mice and raccoons.

“Shoo,” she said as Kiki went for the biscuit. “That’s not for you. You’ll have to wait for lunch to get yours.”

They went up to the top of the hill and into the woods, the dogs chasing each other in circles while Lily kept stopping to investigate some interesting seed pod or cluster of weeds. They had lunch a couple of miles farther on, sitting on a stone outcrop that overlooked the Big Sinkhole, a two- or three- acre depression with the entrance to a cave at the bottom. The entrance went straight down for about four feet, then opened into a large cave. Lily had climbed down into it the first time she’d come here and found old bits of rotting furniture and barrels and such scattered around the dank interior. Stories abounded as to who’d been living there in the old days— from mountain men and runaway slaves to moon-shiners hiding from the revenue men—but no one knew the real history of the place.

Most of the mountains around Aunt’s cabin were riddled with caves of all shapes and sizes. There were entrances everywhere, though most only went a few yards in before they ended. But some said you could walk from one end of the Kickaha Hills to the other, all underground, if you knew the way. There was even a cave entrance not far from the cabin. Aunt had built shelves inside this smaller cave and they kept their root vege tables and seed potatoes for next year’s planting on the wooden planks, keeping them safe from the animals with a little door made of wood and tin. It was better than having to bury them in the ground to keep them away from the frost the way some had to do.

Lunch finished, Lily slid down from the rock. She didn’t feel like caving today, nor drawing. Instead she kept thinking about the painting box, how odd it had been to find it after its having been lost for so many years, so she led the dogs back to that part of the woods to see what else she might find. A shiver went up her spine. What if she found their bones?

The dogs grew more playful as she neared the spot where she’d come upon the box. They nipped at her sleeves or crouched ahead of her, butts and tails in the air, growling so fiercely they made her laugh. Finally Max bumped her leg with his head just as she was in midstep. She lost her balance and fell into a pile of leaves, her satchel tumbling to the ground, spilling drawings.

She sat up. A smile kept twitching at the corner of her mouth but she managed to give them a pretty fierce glare.

“Two against one?” she said. “Well, come on, you bullies. I’m ready for you.”

She jumped on Kiki and wrestled her to the ground, the dog squirming with delight in her grip. Max joined the tussle and soon the three of them were rolling about in the leaves like the puppies the dogs no longer were and Lily had never been. They were having such fun that at first none of them heard the shouting. When they did, they stopped their roughhousing to find a man standing nearby, holding a stick in his upraised hand.

“Get away from her!” he cried, waving the stick.

Lily sat up, so many leaves tangled in her hair and caught in her sweater that she had more on her than did some of the autumned trees around them. She put a hand on the collar of either dog, but, curiously, neither seemed inclined to bark or chase the stranger off. They stayed by her side, staring at him.

Lily studied him for a long moment, too, as quiet as the dogs. He wasn’t a big man, but he seemed solid. Dressed in a fraying broadcloth suit with a white shirt underneath and worn leather boots on his feet. His hair was roughly trimmed and he looked as if he hadn’t shaved for a few days. But he had a good face— strong features, laugh lines around his eyes and the corners of his mouth. She didn’t think he was much older than she.

“It’s all right,” she told the man. “We were just funning.”

There was something familiar about him, but she couldn’t place it immediately.

“Of course,” he said, dropping the stick. “How stupid can I be? What animal in this forest would harm its Lady?” He went down on his knees. “Forgive my impertinence.”

This was too odd for words. From the strange behavior of the dogs to the man’s even stranger behavior. She couldn’t speak. Then something changed in the man’s eyes. There’d been a lost look in them a moment ago, but also hope. Now there was only resignation.

“You’re just a girl,” he said.

Lily found her voice at that indignity.

“I’m seventeen,” she told him. “In these parts, there’s some would think I’m already an old maid.”

He shook his head. “Your pardon. I meant no insult.”

Lily relaxed a little. “That’s all right.”

He reached over to where her drawings had spilled from her satchel and put them back in, looking at each one for a moment before he did.

“These are good,” he said. “Better than good.”

For those few moments while he looked through her drawings, while he looked at them carefully, one by one, before replacing them in her satchel, he seemed different once more. Not so lost. Not so sad.

“Thank you,” she sad.

She waited a moment, thinking it might be rude of her to follow a compliment with a question that might be considered prying. She waited until the last drawing was back in her satchel and he sat there holding the leather bag on his lap, his gaze gone she didn’t know where.

“What are you doing here in the woods?” she finally asked.

It took a moment before his gaze returned to her. He closed the satchel and laid it on the grass between them.

“I took you for someone else,” he said, which wasn’t an answer at all. “It was the wild tangle of your red hair— the leaves in it and on your sweater. But you’re too young and your skin’s not a coppery brown.”

“And this explains what?” she asked.

“I thought you were Her,” he said.

Lily could hear the emphasis he put on the word, but it still didn’t clear up her confusion.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.

She started to pluck the leaves out of her hair and brush them from her sweater. The dogs laid down, one on either side of her, still curiously subdued.

“I thought you were the Lady of the Wood,” he explained. “She who stepped out of a tree and welcomed us when we came out of the cave between the worlds. She wears a cloak of leaves and has moonlight in Her eyes.”

A strange feeling came over Lily when he said “stepped out of a tree.” She found herself remembering a fever dream she’d once had— five years ago when she’d been snakebit. It had been so odd. She’d dreamt that she’d been changed into a kitten to save her from the snakebite, met Aunt’s Apple Tree Man and another wood spirit called the Father of Cats. She’d even seen the fairies she’d tried to find for so long: foxfired shapes, bobbing in the meadow like fireflies.

It had all seemed so real.

Aunt hadn’t said a thing as Lily had babbled on about her adventures. She’d only held her close, held her so tight it was hard to breathe for a moment. Tired from her long day, Lily had gone to bed as soon as they returned to their cabin and not woken for two days when she found Beau Welch sitting in a wooden chair by her bed. His features broke into a grin when he saw her open her eyes.

“Em,” he said over his shoulder. “She’s back.”

And then Aunt joined him, Beau’s wife, Harlene, beside her.

“You gave us a right scare, you did,” Aunt said, stroking Lily’s brow with her fingers. “But I guess the Lord heard my prayers and He didn’t take you away from me.”

“There was a snake . . .” Lily began.

Harlene nodded. “You got bit bad. But you fought off that poison like a soldier. There’s nothing wrong with you that a little rest won’t cure.”

“It was magic,” Lily tried to tell them. “I got to see the fairies.”

Beau chuckled. “I don’t doubt you did. Folks see every sort of thing in a fever.”

Lily was too tired to try to convince them that what she’d seen was real.

She’d gone to the Apple Tree Man’s tree in the orchard when Aunt finally allowed she was fit enough to get out of bed.

“Thank you, thank you,” she’d told him.

But he didn’t step out of his tree to talk to her. She didn’t see the Father of Cats again either. Or the fairies. And though she tried to hold the whole of it fast in her mind, it all began to fade the way that dreams do.

That was when she finally put aside the fancies of childhood and took up drawing— a different kind of fancy, she supposed, but at least you could hold the paper in your hands and look at what you’d drawn. The drawings didn’t fade away. They were always there when you went back to look at them.

She blinked away the memories and focused on the stranger again. He’d gotten off his knees and was sitting cross- legged on the ground, a half- dozen feet from where she and the dogs were.

“What did you mean when you said ‘us’?” she asked.

Now it was his turn to look confused.

“You said this lady showed ‘us’ some cave.”

He nodded. “I was out painting with Milo when—”

As soon as he mentioned that name, the earlier sense of familiarity collided with her memory of a photo in her book on the Newford Naturalists.

“You’re Frank Spain!” Lily cried.

He nodded in agreement.

“But that can’t be,” she said. “You don’t look any older than you do in the picture in my book.”

“What book?”

“The one about Milo Johnson and the rest of the Newford Naturalists that’s back at the cabin.”

“There’s a book about us?”

“You’re famous,” Lily told him with a grin. “The book says you and Mr. Johnson disappeared twenty years ago while you

were out painting in these very hills.”

Frank shook his head, the shock plain in his features.

“Twenty . . . years?” he said slowly. “How’s that even possible? We’ve only been gone for a few days . . .”

“What happened to you?” Lily asked.

“I don’t really know,” he said. “We’d come here after a winter of being cooped up in the studio, longing to paint in the landscape itself. We meant to stay until the black flies drove us back to the city, but then . . .” He shook his head. “Then we found the cave and met the Lady . . .”

He seemed so lost and confused that Lily took him home.

Aunt greeted his arrival and introduction with a raised eyebrow. Lily knew what she was thinking. First a painting box, now a paint er. What would be next?

But Aunt had never turned anyone away from her cabin before and she wasn’t about to start now. She had Lily show Frank to where he could draw some water from the well and clean up, then set a third plate for supper. It wasn’t until later when they were sitting out on the porch drinking tea and watching the night fall that Frank told them his story. He told them how he and Milo had found the cave that led them through darkness into another world. How they’d met the Lady there, with Her cloak of leaves and Her coppery skin, Her dark, dark eyes and Her fox- red hair.

“So there is an underground way through these mountains,” Aunt said. “I always reckoned there was some truth to that story.”

Frank shook his head. “The cave didn’t take us to the other side of the mountains. It took us out of this world and into another.”

Aunt smiled. “Next thing you’re going to tell me is you’ve been to Fairyland.”

“Look at him,” Lily said. She went inside and got her book, opening it to the photograph of Frank Spain. “He doesn’t look any older than he did when this picture was taken.”

Aunt nodded. “Some people do age well.”

“Not this well,” Lily said.

Aunt turned to Frank. “So what is it that you’re asking us to believe?”

“I’m not asking anything,” he said. “I don’t believe it myself.”

Lily sighed and took the book over to him. She showed him the copyright date, put her finger on the paragraph that described how he and Milo Johnson had gone missing some fifteen years earlier.

“The book’s five years old,” she said. “But I think we’ve got a newspaper that’s no more than a month old. I could show you the date on it.”

But Frank was already shaking his head. He’d gone pale reading the paragraph about the mystery of his and his mentor’s disappearance. He lifted his gaze to meet Aunt’s.

“I guess maybe we were in Fairyland,” he said, his voice gone soft.

Aunt looked from her niece’s face to that of her guest.

“How’s that possible?” she said.

“I truly don’t know,” he told her.

He turned the pages of the book, stopping to read the section on himself. Lily knew what he was reading. His father had died in a mining accident when he was still a boy, but his mother had been alive when he’d disappeared. She’d died five years later.

“My parents are gone, too,” she told him.

He nodded, his eyes shiny.

Lily shot Aunt a look, but Aunt sat in her chair, staring out into the gathering dusk, an unreadable expression in her features. Lily supposed it was one thing to appreciate a fairy tale but quite another to find yourself smack-dab in the middle of one.

Lily was taking it the best of either of them. Maybe it was because of that snakebite fever dream she’d once had. In the past five years she still woke from dreams in which she’d been a kitten.

“Why did you come back?” she asked Frank.

“I didn’t know I was coming back,” he said. “That world . . .” He flipped a few pages back to show them reproductions of Johnson’s paintings. “That’s what this other world’s like. You don’t have to imagine everything being more of itself than it seems to be here like Milo’s done in these paintings. Over there it’s really like that. You can’t imagine the colours, the intensity, the rich wash that fills your heart as much as it does your eyes. We haven’t painted at all since we got over there. We didn’t need to.” He laughed. “I know Milo abandoned his paints before we crossed over, and to tell you the truth, I don’t even know where mine are.”

“I found Mr. Johnson’s box,” Lily said. “Yesterday— not far from where you came upon me and the dogs.”

He nodded, but she didn’t think he’d heard her.

“I was walking,” he said. “Looking for the Lady. We hadn’t seen Her for a day or so and I wanted to talk to Her again. To ask Her about that place. I remember I came to this grove of sycamore and beech where we’d seen Her a time or two. I stepped in between the trees, out of the sun and into the shade. The next thing I knew I was walking in these hills and I was back here where everything seems . . . paler. Subdued.”

He looked at them.

“I’ve got to go back,” he said. “There’s no place for me here. Ma’s gone and everybody I knew’ll be dead like her or too changed for me to know them anymore.” He tapped the book. “Just like me, according to what it says here.”

“You don’t want to go rushing into anything,” Aunt said. “Surely you’ve got other kin and they’ll be wanting to see you.”

“There’s no one. Me and Ma, we were the last of the Spains that I know.”

Aunt nodded in a way that Lily recognized. It was her way of making you think she agreed with you, but she was really just waiting for common sense to take hold of you so that you didn’t go off half- cocked and get yourself in some kind of trouble you didn’t need to get into.

“You’ll want to rest up,” she said. “You can sleep in the barn. Lily will show you where. Come morning, everything’ll make a lot more sense.”

He just looked at her. “How do you make sense out of something like this?”

“You trust me on this,” she said. “A good night’s sleep does a body wonders.”

So he followed her advice— most people did when Aunt had decided what was best for them.

He let Lily take him down to the barn where they made a bed for him in the straw. She wondered if he’d try to kiss her, and how she’d feel if he did, but she never got the chance to find out.

“Thank you,” he said and then he lay down on the blankets.

He was already asleep by the time she was closing the door.

And in the morning he was gone.

That night Lily had one of what she thought of as her storybook dreams. She wasn’t a kitten this time. Instead, she was sitting under the Apple Tree Man’s tree and he stepped out of the trunk of his tree just like she remembered him doing in that fever dream when the twelve- year- old girl she’d been was bitten by a snake. He looked the same, too, a raggedy man, gnarled and twisty, like the boughs of his tree.

“You,” she only said and looked away.

“That’s a fine welcome for an old friend.”

“You’re not my friend. Friends aren’t magical men who live in a tree and then make you feel like you’re crazy because they never show up in your life again.”

“And yet I helped you when you were a kitten.”

“In the fever dream when I thought I was a kitten.”

He came around and sat on his haunches in front of her, all long gangly limbs and tattered clothes and bird’s nest hair. His face was wrinkled like the dried fruit from his tree.

He sighed. “It was better for you to only remember it as a dream.”

“So it wasn’t a dream?” she asked, unable to keep the eagerness from her voice. “You’re real? You and the Father of Cats and the fairies in the field?”

“Someplace we’re real.”

She looked at him for a long moment, then nodded, disappointment taking the place of her momentary happiness.

“This is just a dream, too, isn’t it?” she said.

“This is. What happened before wasn’t.”

She poked at the dirt with her finger, looking away from him again.

“Why would it be better for me to remember it as a dream?” she asked.

“Our worlds aren’t meant to mix— not anymore. They’ve grown too far apart. When you spend too much time in ours, you become like your paint er foundling, forever restless and unhappy in the world where you belong. Instead of living your life, you lose yourself in dreams and fancies.”

“Maybe for some, dreams and fancies are better than what they have here.”

“Maybe,” he said, but she knew he didn’t agree. “Is that true for you?”

“No,” she had to admit. “But I still don’t understand why I was allowed that one night and then no more.”

She looked at him. His dark eyes were warm and kind, but there was a mystery in them, too. Something secret and daunting that she wasn’t sure she could ever understand. That perhaps she shouldn’t want to understand.

“Your world is no less a place of marvels and wonders,” he said after a long moment. “That’s something humans too often forget and why what you do is so important.”

She laughed. “What I do? Whatever do I do that could be so important?”

“Perhaps it’s not what you do now so much as what you will do if you continue with your drawing and painting.”

She shook her head. “I’m not really that good.”

“Do you truly believe that?”

She remembered what Frank Spain had said after looking at her drawings.

These are good. Better than good.

She remembered how the drawings had, if only for a moment, taken him away from the sadness that lay so heavy in his heart.

“But I’m only drawing the woods,” she said. “I’m drawing what I see, not fairies and fancies.”

The Apple Tree Man nodded. “Sometimes people need fairies and fancies to wake them up to what they already have. They look so hard for the little face in the thistle, the wrinkled man who lives in a tree. But then they start to focus on the thistle itself, the feathery purples of its bloom, the sharp points of its thorns. They reach out and touch the rough bark of the tree, drink in the green of its leaves, taste of its fruit. And they’re transformed. They’re in their own world, fully and completely, sometimes for the first time since they were a child, and they’re finally appreciating what it has to offer them.

“That one moment can stop them from ever falling asleep again. Just as the one glimpse such as you had can wake a lifetime of imagination. It can fuel a thousand stories and paintings. But how you use your imagination, what stories you decide to tell, will come from inside you, not from a momentary glitter of fairy wings.”

“But it wakes an ache, too,” Lily said.

He nodded. “That never goes away. I know. But if you were to come into our world, it still wouldn’t go away. And then you’d also ache for the world you left behind. Better to leave things as they are, Lillian. Better the small ache that carries in it a seed of wonder than the larger ache that can never be satisfied.”

“So why did you come to me to night? Why are you telling me all of this?”

“To ask you not to look for that cave,” he said. “To not go in. If you do, you’ll carry the yearning of what you find inside forever.”

What the Apple Tree Man had told her all seemed to make perfect sense in last night’s dream. But when she woke to find Frank gone, what made sense then didn’t seem to be nearly enough now. Knowing she’d once experienced a real glimpse into a storybook world, she only found herself wanting more.

“Well, it seems like a lot of trouble to go through,” Aunt said when Lily came back from the barn with the news that their guest was gone. “To cadge a meal and a roof over your head for the night, I mean.”

“I don’t think he was lying.”

Aunt shrugged.

“But he looked just like the picture in my book.”

“There was a resemblance,” Aunt said. “But really. The story he told... it’s too hard to believe.”

“Then how do you explain it?”

Aunt thought for a moment, then shook her head.

“Can’t say that I can,” she admitted.

“I think he’s gone to look for the cave. He wants to go back.”

“And I suppose you want to go looking for him.”

Lily nodded.

“Are you sweet on him?” Aunt asked.

“I don’t think I am.”

“Can’t say’s I’d blame you. He was a good- looking man.”

“I’m just worried about him,” Lily said. “He’s all lost and alone and out of his own time.”

“And say you find him. Say you find the cave. What then?”

The Apple Tree Man’s warning and Aunt’s obvious concern struggled against her own desire to find the cave, to see the magical land that lay beyond it.

“I’d have the chance to say goodbye,” she said.

There. She hadn’t exactly lied. She hadn’t said everything she could have, but she hadn’t lied.

Aunt studied her for a long moment.

“You just be careful,” she said. “See to the cow and chickens, but the garden can wait till you get back.”

Lily grinned. She gave Aunt a quick kiss, then packed herself a lunch. She was almost out the door when she turned back and took Milo Johnson’s painting box out from under her bed.

“Going to try those paints?” Aunt asked.

“I think so.”

And she did, but it wasn’t nearly the success she’d hoped it would be.

The morning started fine, but then walking in these woods of hers was a sure cure for any ailment, especially when it was in your heart or head. The dogs hadn’t come to join her today, but that was all right seeing how oddly they’d acted around Frank yesterday. She wondered what they knew, what had they sensed about him?

She made her way down to that part of the wood where she’d first found the box, and then later Frank, but he was nowhere about. Either he’d found his way back into fairyland, or he was just ignoring her voice. Finally she gave up and spent awhile looking for this cave of his, but there were too many in this part of the forest and none of them looked— no, none of them felt right.

After lunch, she sat down and opened the painting box.

The drawing she did on the back of one of Johnson’s three paintings turned out well, though it was odd using her pencil on a wood panel. But she’d gotten the image she wanted: the sweeping boughs of an old beech tree, smooth- barked and tall, the thick crush of underbrush around it, the forest behind. It was the colours that proved to be a problem. The paints wouldn’t do what she wanted. It was hard enough to get each tube open they were stuck so tight, but once she had a squirt of the various colours on the palette it all went downhill from there.

The colours were wonderfully bright— pure pigments that had their own inner glow. At least they did until she started messing with them and then everything turned to mud. When she tried to mix them she got either outlandish hues or colours so dull they all might as well have been the same. The harder she tried, the worse it got.

Sighing, she finally wiped off the palette and the panel she’d been working on, then cleaned the brushes, dipping them in the little jar of turpentine, working the paint out of the hairs with a rag. She studied Johnson’s paintings as she worked, trying to figure out how he’d gotten the colours he had. This was his box, after all. These were the same colours he’d used to paint these three amazing paintings. Everything she needed was just lying there in the box, waiting to be used. So why was she so hopeless?

It was because painting was no different from looking for fairies, she supposed. No different from trying to find that cave entrance into some magic elsewhere. Some people just weren’t any good at that sort of thing.

They were both magic, after all. Art as well as fairies. Magic. What else could you call how Johnson was able to bring the forest to life with no more than a few colours on a flat surface?

She could practice, of course. And she would. She hadn’t been any good when she’d first started drawing either. But she wasn’t sure that she’d ever feel as . . . inspired as Johnson must have felt.

She studied the inside lid of the box. Even this abstract pattern where he’d probably only been testing his colour mixes had so much vibrancy and passion.

The odd feeling she’d gotten the first time she’d looked inside the lid yesterday returned, but this time she didn’t look away. Instead, she leaned closer.

What was it about this pattern of colours?

She found herself thinking about her Newford Naturalists book, about something Milo Johnson was supposed to have said. “It’s not just a matter of painting en plein air as the Impressionists taught us,” the author quoted Johnson. “It’s just as important to simply be in the wilds. Many times the only painting box I take is in my head. You don’t have to be an artist to bring something back from your wilderness experiences. My best paintings don’t hang in galleries. They hang somewhere in between my ears— an endless private showing that I can only attempt to share with others through a more physical medium.”

That must be why he’d abandoned this painting box she’d found. He’d gone into fairyland only bringing the one in his head. Frank had said as much last night. Unless . . .

She smiled as the fancy came to her.

Unless the box she’d found was the one he carried in his head, made real by some magic of the world into which he and Frank had strayed.

The pattern on the lid of the box seemed to move at that moment and she thought she heard something— an almost music. It was like listening to ravens in the woods when their rough, deep-throated croaks and cries all but seemed like human language. It wasn’t, of course, but still, you felt so close to understanding it.

She lifted her head to look around. It wasn’t ravens she heard. It wasn’t anything she knew, but it still seemed familiar.

Faint, but insistent. Almost like wind chimes or distant bells, but not quite. Almost like birdsong, trills and warbling melodies, but not quite. Almost like an old fiddle tune, played on a pipe or a flute, the rhythm a little ragged, or simply a little out of time like the curious jumps and extra beats in a Kickaha tune. But not quite.

Closing the painting box, she stood. She slung her satchel onto her shoulder, picked up the box, and turned in a slow circle, trying to find the source of what she heard. It was stronger to the west, away from the creek and deeper into the forest. A ravine cut off to the left and she followed it, pushing her way through the thick shrub layer of rhododendrons and mountain laurel. Hemlocks and tulip trees rose up the slopes on either side with a thick understory of redbud, magnolia, and dogwood.

The almost- music continued to pull her along— distant, near, distant, near, like a radio signal that couldn’t quite hang on to a station. It was only when she broke through into a small clearing, a wall of granite rising above her, that she saw the mouth of the cave.

She knew immediately that this had to be the cave Frank had been looking for, the one into which he and Milo Johnson had stepped and so disappeared from the world for twenty years. The almost- music was clearer than ever here, but it was the bas-relief worked into the stone above the entrance that made her sure. Here was Frank’s Lady, a rough carving of a woman’s face. Her hair was thick with leaves and more leaves came spilling out of her mouth, bearding her chin.

Aunt’s general warnings, as well as the Apple Tree Man’s more specific ones, returned to her as she moved closer. She lifted a hand to trace the contours of the carving. As soon as she touched it, the almost- music stopped.

She dropped her hand, starting back as though she’d put a finger on a hot stove. She looked around herself with quick, ner vous glances. Now that the almost- music was gone, she found herself standing in an eerie pocket of silence. The sounds of the forest were muted—as the music had been earlier. She could still hear the insects and birdsong, but they seemed to come from far away.

She turned back to the cave, uneasy now. In the back of her mind she could hear the Apple Tree Man’s voice.

Don’t go in.

I won’t. Not all the way.

But now that she was here, how could she not at least have a look?

She went as far as the entrance, ducking her head because the top of the hole was only as high as her shoulder. It was dark inside, too dark to see in the beginning. But slowly her eyes adjusted to the dimmer lighting.

The first thing she really saw were the paintings.

They were like her own initial attempts at drawing—crude stick figures and shapes that she’d drawn on scraps of paper and the walls of the barn with the charred ends of sticks. Except, where hers had been simple because she could do no better, these, she realized as she studied them more closely, were more like stylized abbreviations. Where her drawings had been tentative, these held power. The paint or chalk had been applied with bold, knowing strokes. Nothing wasted. Complex images distilled to their primal essences.

An antlered man. A turtle. A bear with a sun on its chest, radiating squiggles of light. A leaping stag. A bird of some sort with enormous wings. A woman, cloaked in leaves. Trees of every shape and size. Lightning bolts. A toad. A spiral with the face of the woman on the entrance outside in its center. A fox with an enormous striped tail. A hare with drooping ears and small goat horns.

And more. So many more. Some easily recognizable, others only geometric shapes that seemed to hold whole books of stories in their few lines.

Her gaze travelled over the walls, studying the paintings with growing wonder and admiration. The cave was one of the larger ones she’d found—easily three or four times the size of Aunt’s cabin. There were paintings everywhere, many too hard to make out because they were lost in deeper shadows. She wished she had a corn shuck or lantern to throw more light than what came from the opening behind her. She longed to move closer, but still didn’t dare abandon the safety of the entranceway.

She might have left it like that, drank her fill of the paintings and then gone home, if her gaze hadn’t fallen upon a figure sitting hunched in a corner of the cave, holding what looked like a small bark whistle. She’d made the same kind herself from the straight smooth branches of a chestnut or sourwood tree— Beau had showed her how. You rubbed the bark until it came loose, then cut the naked stick to make stoppers for either end of the bark cylinder, the one by the mouthpiece having a slice taken off the front. When the stoppers were put in you could play a tune if you were musically inclined. She hadn’t been bad, but she’d never been able to whistle nearly so well as what she’d been hearing Frank play earlier.

But the whistle was quiet now. Frank sat so still, enveloped in the shadows, that she might never have noticed him except as she had, by chance.

“Frank...?” she said.

He lifted his head to look at her.

“It’s gone,” he said. “I can’t call it back.”

“The other world?”

He nodded.

“That was you making that... music?”

“It was me doing something,” he said. “I don’t know that I’d go so far as to call it music.”

Lily hesitated a long moment, then finally stepped through the entrance, into the cave itself. She flinched as she crossed the threshold, but nothing happened. There were no flaring lights or sudden sounds. No door opened into another world, sucking her in.

She set the painting box down and sat on her ankles in front of Frank.

“I didn’t know you were a musician,” she said.

“I’m not.”

He held up his reed whistle—obviously something he’d made himself.

“But I used to play as a boy,” he said. “And there was always music there, on the other side. I thought I could wake something. Call me to it, or it to me.”

Lily raised her eyes to the paintings on the wall.

“How did you cross over the first time?” she asked.

He shook his head. “I don’t know. That was Milo’s doing. I was only tagging along.”

“Did he . . . did he make a painting?”

Frank’s gaze settled on hers.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

She pointed to the walls. “Look around you. This is the cave, isn’t it?”

He nodded.

“What do you think these paintings are for?” she asked. When he still didn’t seem to get it, she added, “Perhaps it’s the paintings that open a door between the worlds. Maybe this Lady of yours likes pictures more than She does music.”

Frank scrambled to his feet and studied the walls as though he was seeing the paintings for the first time. Lily was slower to rise.

“If I had paint, I could try it,” he said.

“There’s the painting box I found,” Lily told him. “It’s still full of paints.”

He grinned. Grabbing her arms, he gave her a kiss, right on her lips, full of passion and fire, then bent down to open the box.

“I remember this box,” he said as he rummaged through the paint tubes. “We were out painting, scouting a good location— though for Milo, any location was a good one. Anyway, there we were, out in these woods, when suddenly Milo stuffs this box of his into a tangle of tree roots and starts walking. I called after him, but he never said a word, never even turned around to see if I was coming.

“So I followed, hurrying along behind him until we finally came to this cave. And then... then...”

He looked up at Lily. “I’m not sure what happened. One moment we were walking into the cave and the next we had crossed over into that other place.”

“So Milo didn’t paint on the wall.”

“I just don’t remember. But he might not have had to. Milo could create whole paintings in his head without ever putting brush to canvas. And he could describe that painting to you, stroke for stroke—even years later.”

“I read about that in the book.”

“Hmm.”

Frank had returned his attention to the paints.

“It’ll have to be a specific image,” he said, talking as much to himself as to Lily. “Something simple that still manages to encompass everything a person is or feels.”

“An icon,” Lily said, remembering the word from another of her books.

He nodded in agreement as he continued to sort through the tubes of paint, finally choosing a colour: a burnt umber, rich and dark.

“And then?” Lily asked, remembering what the Apple Tree Man had told her in her dream. “Just saying you find the right image. You paint it on the wall and some kind of door opens up. Then what do you do?”

He looked up at her, puzzled.

“I’ll step through it,” he said. “I’ll go back to the other side.”

“But why?” Lily asked. “Why’s over there so much better than the way the world is here?”

“I ...”

“When you cross over to there,” Lily said, echoing the Apple Tree man’s words to her, “you give up all the things you could be here.”

“We do that every time we make any change in our lives,” Frank said. “It’s like moving from one town to another, though this is a little more drastic, I suppose.” He considered it for a moment, then added, “It’s not so much better over there as different. I’ve never fit in here the way I do over there. And now I don’t have anything left for me here except for this burn inside— a yearning for the Lady and that land of Hers that lies somewhere on the other side of these fields we know.”

“I’ve had that feeling,” Lily said, thinking of her endless search for fairies as a child.

“You can’t begin to imagine what it’s like over there,” Frank went on. “Everything glows with its own inner light.”

He paused and regarded her for a long moment.

“You could come,” he said finally. “You could come with me and see for yourself. Then you’d understand.”

Lily shook her head. “No, I couldn’t. I couldn’t walk out on Aunt, not like this, without a word. Not after she took me in when no one else would. She wasn’t even real family, though she’s family now.” She waited a beat, remembering the strength of his arms, the hard kiss he’d given her, then added, “You could stay.”

Now it was his turn to shake his head.

“I can’t.”

Lily nodded. She understood. It wasn’t like she didn’t have the desire to go herself.

She watched him unscrew the paint tube and squeeze a long worm of dark brown pigment into his palm. He turned to a clear spot on the wall, dipped a finger into the paint and raised his

hand. But then he hesitated.

“You can do it,” Lily told him.

Maybe she couldn’t go. Maybe she wanted him to stay. But she knew enough not to try to hold him back if he had to go. It was no different from making friends with a wild creature. You could catch them and tie them up and make them stay with you, but their heart would never be yours. Their wild heart, the thing you loved about them . . . it would wither and die. So why would you want to do such a thing?

“I can,” Frank agreed, his voice soft. He gave her a smile. “That’s part of the magic, isn’t it? You have to believe that it will work.”

Lily had no idea if that was true or not, but she gave him an encouraging nod all the same.

He hummed something under his breath as he lifted his hand again. Lily recognized it as the almost- music she’d heard before, but now she could make out the tune. She didn’t know its name, but the pickup band at the grange dances played it from time to time. She thought it might have the word “fairy” in it.

Frank’s finger moved decisively, smearing paint on the rock. It took Lily a moment to see that he was painting a stylized oak leaf. He finished the last line and took his finger away, stepped back.

Neither knew what to expect, if anything. As the moments dragged by, Frank stopped humming. He cleaned his hands against the legs of his trousers, smearing paint onto the cloth. His shoulders began to slump and he turned to her.

“Look,” Lily said before he could speak.

She pointed to the wall. The center of the oak leaf he’d painted had started to glow with a warm, green- gold light. They watched the light spread across the wall of the cave, moving out from the central point like ripples from a stone tossed into a still pool of water. Other colours appeared, blues and reds and deeper greens. The colours shimmered, like they were painted on cloth touched by some unseen wind, and then the wall was gone and they were looking through an opening in the rock. Through a door into another world.

There was a forest in there, not much different from the one they’d left behind except that, as Frank had said, every tree, every leaf, every branch and blade of grass, pulsed with its own inner light. It was so bright it almost hurt the eyes, and not simply because they’d been standing in this dim cave for so long.

Everything had a light and a song and it was almost too much to bear. But at the same time, Lily felt the draw of that world like a tightening in her heart. It wasn’t so much a wanting as a need.

“Come with me,” Frank said again.

She had never wanted to do something more in her life. It was not just going to that magical place, it was the idea of being there with this man with his wonderfully creative mind and talent. This man who’d given her her first real kiss.

But slowly she shook her head.

“Have you ever stood on a mountaintop,” she asked, “and watched the sun set in a bed of feathery clouds? Have you ever watched the monarchs settled on a field of milkweed or listened to the spring chorus after the long winter’s done?”

Frank nodded.

“This world has magic, too,” Lily said.

“But not enough for me,” Frank said. “Not after having been over there.”

“I know.”

She stepped up to him and gave him a kiss. He held her for a moment, returning the kiss, then they stepped back from each other.

“Go,” Lily said, giving him a little push. “Go before I change my mind.”

She saw he understood that for her, going would be as much a mistake as staying would be for him. He nodded and turned, walked out into that other world.

Lily stood watching him go. She watched him step in among the trees. She heard him call out and heard another man’s voice reply. She watched as the doorway became a swirl of colours once more. Just before the light faded, it seemed to take the shape of a woman’s face— the same woman whose features had been carved into the stone outside the cave, leaves in her hair, leaves spilling from her mouth. Then it was all gone. The cave was dim once more and she was alone.

Lily knelt down by Milo Johnson’s paint box and closed the lid, fastened the snaps. Holding it by its handle, she stood up and walked slowly out of the cave.

“Are you there?” she asked later, standing by the Apple Tree Man’s tree. “Can you hear me?”

She took a biscuit from her pocket— the one she hadn’t left earlier in the day because she’d still been angry for his appearing in her dream last night when he’d been absent from her life for five years. When he’d let her think that her night of magic had been nothing more than a fever dream brought on by a snakebite.

She put the biscuit down among his roots.

“I just wanted you to know that you were probably right,” she said. “About my going over to that other place, I mean. Not about how I can’t have magic here.”

She sat down on the grass and laid the paint box down beside her, her satchel on top of it. Plucking a leaf from the ground, she began to shred it.

“I know, I know,” she said. “There’s plenty of everyday magic all around me. And I do appreciate it. But I don’t know what’s so wrong about having a magical friend as well.”

There was no reply. No gnarled Apple Tree Man stepping out of his tree. No voice as she’d heard in her dream last night. She hadn’t really been expecting anything.

“I’m going to ask Aunt if I can have an acre or so for my own garden,” she said. “I’ll try growing cane there and sell the molasses at the harvest fair. Maybe put in some berries and make preserves and pies, too. I’ll need some real money to buy more paints.”

She smiled and looked up into the tree’s boughs.

“So you see, I can take advice. Maybe you should give it a try.”

She stood up and dusted off her knees, picked up the painting box and her satchel.

“I’ll bring you another biscuit tomorrow morning,” she said.

Then she started down the hill to Aunt’s cabin.

“Thank you,” a soft, familiar voice said.

She turned. There was no one there, but the biscuit was gone.

She grinned. “Well, that’s a start,” she said and continued on home.
Refinerytown

Relationships are confusing. Actually, life is confusing, but the relationships part of it seems particularly so.

When you don’t have a boyfriend, all your energy focuses around the idea of having one. Doesn’t matter if the last man in your life was some sorry- assed, miserable excuse of a parasitic worm, or if he dumped you. Doesn’t matter that we know we’re supposed to be comfortable in our own lives and expect others to be comfortable with us. The idea of having a boyfriend is forever looming on the periphery of everything we do.

But then you get a boyfriend— a good one, mind you— and the funny thing is, you’re still not necessarily content. Because now the boyfriend relationship starts looming over all the other ones in your life. Your relationships with your family, your friends, your art...

He talks about having to go away for a bit, and you think, okay, that’s sad, but I’ll get all this work done. I’ll have the chance to gather up the tattered ribbons of semi- suspended friendships and actually spend some time with them.

Except the boyfriend’s going away leaves this big hole in your days and everything’s still unbalanced.

Like I said. It’s confusing.

“So it’s just going to be a one- shot,” I say. “Unless it really takes off, I guess.”

Jilly wheels over to one of the long tables in the green house to put the storyboards I’ve given her on a flat surface. She’s a lot better than she was in the first few months after the accident, but simple things, like holding something large for too long, still aren’t possible.

“I like the art,” she says as she spreads them out. “It’s pretty different from your usual strips. More cartoony.”

“That’s Nina’s influence,” I tell her. “She’s really into anime— you know, that Japanese animation stuff.”

“Who’s Nina?” Sophie asks.

“Nina Hoffman. We’re collaborating on this comic.”

“We met her during the summer,” Jilly says. “Remember that book signing you took me to?”

“Oh, her.” Sophie grins. “She was fun.”

The three of us are in the green house that’s attached to the back of Professor Dapple’s house. Jilly’s been staying with him since she got out of rehab. Sophie moved in to help her out and give her some company. The professor had converted the greenhouse into an artist’s studio years ago, when they were both still in university. In those days Jilly shared the space with our friend Isabelle and dubbed it the Grumbling Green house Studio after the professor’s cranky house keeper, Goon. Now Sophie’s using it to keep up with her own art. She and Jilly spend some mornings and most afternoons in it. Three mornings a week Sophie takes Jilly to her physio appointments.

“We’re calling it ‘Refinerytown,’ ” I say. “After those Bordertown books by Terri Windling.”

Jilly smiles. “I got the reference.”

“We were just talking one day— goofing really— but then it all started to click, so we decided to actually do something with it.”

“I didn’t know Nina wrote comics.”

“She helps with the plotting,” I say. “And also the background and characters. She originally wanted to pitch it to her editor at Viking— this wild woman named Sharyn November— but Sharyn was so totally not into it. And this from a woman who has chicken puppets.”

“Really?” Jilly asks. “She has chicken puppets?”

I nod. Trust Jilly to zero in on that.

“Apparently,” I tell her. “Three life- sized ones. She’s managed to get out of most of her editorial meetings because they won’t let her bring them in with her any more. Nina says she’d have the head poke up over the edge of the table when someone was talking and have the chicken yawn, or make faces at people.”

“I think she’s putting you on,” Sophie says.

“No, it’s true. They’re like these Muppet chickens.”

“I’d love to have a chicken puppet,” Jilly says.

Sophie leaves the painting she’s working on to look over Jilly’s shoulder at the first few pages of the comic that I’ve finished so far.

“I notice a complete lack of chickens on these pages,” she says. “Puppet or otherwise.”

“No chickens,” I agree. “Just oily fairies.”

Sophie smiles. “They’re really cute. When you first started talking about fairies that lived in oil refineries . . .” She shoots me a grin. “Well, I didn’t know what to think.”

“And those names,” Jilly says. “Greasy. Oilpan.”

Sophie giggles. “Slick.”

“He’s my favourite,” I tell them. “We’re still trying to figure out what his girlfriend’s name should be.”

“Diesel,” Jilly says.

Sophie shakes her head. “No. Squeaky.”

“And there has to be a kind of dumb one called Dipstick.”

“Thanks a lot, you guys.”

“We’re just teasing,” Sophie assures me.

“I know.” I shrug. “But I don’t even know how it’s going to play out. Probably nobody will buy it.”

“I’ll buy it,” Jilly tells me.

“Nobody I don’t know.”

“Oh, pfft. What’s not to like? They’re cute. They live in an oil refinery . . .”

“Exactly. People want their fairies in pastoral, natural settings. Like Brian Froud does. Or Charles Vess.”

“People used to like my fairies,” Jilly says, “and they just lived in junkyards and alleyways.”

“That’s because you were a brilliant paint er,” I say, then my voice trails off as I realize what that must sound like. “Oh, God. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. Like your painting days are forever over.”

Ever since the accident, Jilly hasn’t been able to paint. Partial paralysis of her drawing arm saw to that. She’s been messing around with her left hand, but mostly she just gets frustrated.

“It’s okay,” she says. “I’m the one who brought it up in the first place.”

Sophie walks over to the sink in the corner of the green house and takes three cups down from the low shelf just above it. Filling each with tea out of a thermos, she hands them around to us, then hoists herself up to sit on the worktable beside my drawings.

“So why are you doing this comic?” she asks.

I shrug. “I don’t know exactly. I guess I want a shot at something more than just writing about myself all the time. That’s where Nina comes in. I can’t write about myself if we’re collaborating on it.”

“All the art we do is about ourselves,” Sophie says. “Writing, painting. Songs, dance. You name it. If it means anything, there’s a piece of you at the heart of it.”

I can’t argue with that. “I guess I just want to try something that’s not so obviously about me.”

“I can see that,” Jilly says.

Sophie nods in agreement.

“So how’s your werewolf boyfriend?” Jonathan asks.

I’m sitting at the counter in The Half Kaffe Café, sipping a latte, and look up. Jonathan has apparently finished reading the latest copy of Mojo and now needs some conversational stimulation. I guess since he’s the owner, he doesn’t have to look busy when there’s nothing to do. He’s certainly not overrun with customers at the moment. We have the place to ourselves, except for the dreadlocked student sitting at a window table, hunched over her laptop. The new Pink CD’s playing on the sound system, the singer telling her diary that she’s been a bad, bad girl. I know that feeling.

“He’s not a werewolf,” I tell Jonathan. “He’s a shapechanger.”

“And the difference is?”

“He can choose what he wants to be, when he wants to be. And he doesn’t have to go around chewing things up during the full moon.”

Jonathan nods sagely. He does cool so well, bless his soul, but I knew him as a nerdy little computer geek, heavy into junk food and techno music. That was back in our art school days. The only art Jonathan does now are Photoshopped notices and menus for the café. But the funny thing is, these days he looks like the Bohemian artist he wanted to be in our college days. Slender in his black jeans and shirt, skin clear, mop of blue- black unruly hair, dark eyes no longer hidden behind his old Buddy Holly glasses. Those only come out late at night now, when his contacts start to bother him.

“How come he never changes in front of us?” Jonathan asks.

I feel like going out and buying him another music magazine, but I’m sure he already has every current one. So I try to answer him instead.

“That’d be like you going out with a stripper and us expecting her to dance for us.”

“When did I ever go out with a stripper?”

“I said ‘like you.’ ”

“But what made you think of a stripper?”

“I don’t know.”

“Because if you know any strippers . . .”

“Oh please. Focus here, would you.”

Jonathan smiles. “I’m just making conversation.”

“Right.”

“So where is the wolf man these days, anyway?”

“His name’s Lyle.”

“Sorry. Where’s Lyle?”

“He’s out of town. Something to do with his family.”

“Which, for him, would be a pack.”

“Jonathan,” I say, in what I hope’s a firm voice. “Would you please give it a rest?”

“Okay, okay. I’m resting.”

“And for your information, they refer to themselves as clans.”

I suppose I should explain this werewolf business.

It’s a running joke with my friends— has been ever since I wrote about how Lyle and I met in my comic strip–cum-journal “Spunky Grrl,” which appears weekly in In the City. I guess every city’s got one or more of these weeklies— an alternative press newspaper with show listings, news bits, reviews, and columns. I’m in good company here. In the City regularly features Dan Savage’s column, strips like Dave Russell’s “True Monkey Boy Adventures,” and Lynda Berry’s ongoing sagas.

Lyle and I met right here in the café on a blind date courtesy of the personals— something I don’t make a habit of doing, let me add. Though I guess neither of us has to do that anymore anyway.

After a little bit of a rocky start involving a bunch of renegade shapechangers— don’t ask, it’s way too long a story— we’ve sort of settled into a nice, relatively normal boyfriend/girlfriend relationship.

The thing is, while regular readers of In the City would figure that shapechanger storyline was just me exercising my imagination—of which I’ve got an excess anyway— my friends all know that only true stuff goes in the strip. Same with “My Life as a Bird,” a longer, autobigraphical strip that runs in my own bimonthly comic book, The Girl Zone. The real difference is, the pen & ink Mona gets to have the last word— you know, like telling the guy off the way you would have when he dumped you, except you couldn’t think of what to say until an hour later. The pen & ink Mona’s never at a loss for exactly the right thing to say, though otherwise both strips do faithfully wander through the ongoing parade of my various screw ups and mishaps. They have to. Panel after panel of me sitting around drinking coffee with my friends would make for dull reading after awhile.

“If ‘Refinerytown’ works as well as I think it will,” Nina says, “I’ve got some other fun ideas.”

We’re talking on the phone about a week after my visit to the Grumbling Green house Studio. It’s late at night for me, but still before midnight for her in Eugene, Oregon. Ever since we’ve started this project there’ve been any number of e-mails, faxes, and phone calls going back and forth between our houses. Tonight we started talking about the JPEG character design for Slick’s girlfriend I sent her an hour or so ago. But our conversations never stay on topic.

“Such as?” I ask.

I’m a little hesitant. Nina’s a lovely woman to be sure, but she has the wildest ideas. You should read her books.

“It’s about this snake named Pelican Bob,” she says. “He wants to have wings, but of course he can’t because he’s a snake.”

“There’ve been winged snakes.”

“Sure. If you’re an Aztec god, maybe.”

“Dragons are kind of like snakes with wings.”

Nina laughs. “Well, of course they are. But I’m talking smaller scale here.”

“Ouch.”

“Sorry. But you know what I mean. This’ll be the small story. Sort of like The Little Engine That Could, except it’ll be about a snake who can’t.”

You see what I mean? And she talks like this all the time. Good thing she’s a writer and gets to let that stuff out onto the page. Otherwise she might find the men in white coats knocking on her door.

“So have you heard from Lyle?” she asks.

“He called earlier. He says he’s bored, but he sounds like he’s doing okay.”

“You miss him, don’t you?”

“Sure. I’m supposed to, aren’t I?”

“That’s a funny way to put it,” she says.

“I’m just confused,” I tell her. “Boyfriends make everything so complicated, both when you have them and when you don’t.”

“Do you love him?”

“It’s not that. It’s more . . . I have this image of myself as an independent woman and it drives me crazy that all Lyle has to do is call and see if I want to get together, and I’ll drop whatever I’m doing, even if I’ve got a deadline looming, to go off and see him. Before he was in my life I was always mooning about having a boyfriend. Now I’m always mooning about my boyfriend.”

Nina laughs. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m not laughing at you. But it’s kind of funny, when you think about it.”

“Oh, I know. It’s all so Marie Antoinette. Having my cake and all.”

“Have you talked to Lyle about it?”

I sigh. “It’s nothing Lyle’s doing. He’s actually pretty much the most perfect boyfriend I’ve had. It’s me and the constant story of my life that runs through my head.”

“Even in ‘Refinerytown’?”

“No. That’s why ‘Refinerytown’ is so important to me right now. It’s about the only time I’m not inside my head, trying to make sense of what I’m doing and why I’m doing it.”

I guess the way my life goes, I should have expected one of these Refinerytown fairies to show up sooner or later. For real, I mean. The way I had a cantankerous sort- of- dwarf move in on me a few years ago, or find myself going out now with a guy who everybody thinks is a werewolf.

Nina and I settled on Diesel as the name for Slick’s girlfriend. She’s fun to draw— definitely sexier than any character I’ve done before, with her hourglass figure and flirty ways. The way the whole story starts is when this trollish guy named Crude who lives under one of the fractionating towers— the place where the crude oil is separated into more useful compounds— thinks that Diesel’s interested in him. She’s not, of course, but it starts a chain reaction of events that allows us to fill our thirty- two pages of comic book with a fun, rollicking story.

So it’s late at night and I’m sitting at the drawing board, laying out the panels for my next page. This is the one where Slick and Oilpan are spying on Diesel to see if she’s really going to meet Crude at this midnight rendezvous the way Crude has boasted she is. What they don’t know is that Diesel’s best friend Ethane is spying on them and—

“Ahem.”

I sit up with a start at the sound of someone clearing their throat. I look around, but I’m still alone in my studio, which is

really just one end of my living room.

“Down here,” a strange, small voice says.

My gaze follows its husky timbre to the top of my drawing desk and there she is, sitting on a bottle of Calli ink.

“Whoa,” I say. “I’ve been working way too much on this.”

Because standing— well, sitting— there, at a height of no more than eight inches, is Diesel. Not the Diesel I’ve been drawing. She’s got the knee- high motorcycle boots with all the buckles and zippers. The black jeans and the torn T-shirt to show off her midriff. The hourglass figure and the heart- stopping face and the little pointed ears sticking up on either side of her black wool beanie, midnight hair spilling in a tangle of curls down her back. But this is the real thing. The difference between her and the anime Diesel I’ve been drawing is as profound as it would be between you and the caricature someone might draw of you.

“You’re getting it all wrong,” she says.

“I think I need a time- out,” I tell her.

“That’s what the other big- head said.”

“Big head? I don’t have a big head.”

“Oh, relax. It’s just what we call you.”

“I just think if you’re going to insult somebody, you should at least be accurate.”

I can’t believe I’m arguing with an eight- inch- tall oil fairy about the size of my head.

She stands up, puts a hand on her hip, and glares at me. I’ve drawn her in that exact same pose, only much more cartoony.

“Oh, but you can write what ever you want about us,” she says. “I can’t believe how you’re telling the story. I’m goofing with Crude just to get Slick to give me some space.”

“But—”

“He’s always just so there. Sometimes I feel like I can’t even breathe.”

“I didn’t even know you were real,” I say. I resist the urge to poke at her with a finger. “Are you real?”

“Of course I’m real.”

“And you live in a refinery?”

“Where else would a refinery fairy live?”

She’s got me there.

“So where is your refinery?” I ask.

She gives an exaggerated sigh. “Don’t you read what you write? It’s ‘east of wherever, on the far side of dreams.’ Like it says on page one.”

I lean back in my chair.

“This is going to take some getting used to,” I tell her.

“Oh, please. Like you’re not dating a werewolf.”

“He’s not a werewolf, he’s a—”

“Canid. I know. A shapechanger. Same difference. He still turns into a wolf.”

Though not for me. If I hadn’t seen his face . . . shift that one time, when the other shapechangers were ready to attack us, I don’t know what I’d believe. I asked him once why he doesn’t change in front of me and he said he didn’t want me to start thinking of him as my pet dog. I’m not a hundred percent sure he was joking.

“So are you going to fix it?” Diesel asks.

“Fix what?”

For a moment I think she’s talking about my relationship with Lyle, and there’s nothing to fix. At least not on his part. I’m the one with confusion banging around in my head.

“The story,” she says. “What else?”

“What did Nina say?” I ask, hoping to buy myself a little time.

“She said I should talk to you.”

I’m paying attention to our conversation, really I am, but at the same time I’m so fascinated to see her standing here, this real flesh- and- blood version of something I thought Nina and I had made up. She’s got the poutiest lips, and that figure. No wonder

half the guys in Refinerytown are so crazy about her.

“Hello, big- head?” Diesel says. “Are you still with me?”

I blink. “My name’s Mona,” I tell her.

“I know that.”

“How can you be here?” I ask. “I mean—”

“As in, you and your friend made us up, how can we be real, blah blah blah.”

“Well... yeah.”

She gives me this wicked little grin, which is just the way I’ve drawn her when she’s about to say something dazzlingly obvious to Slick or Dipstick.

“Magic,” she says.

“Well, if that’s not a cop- out, then I don’t know what is.”

“Look,” she says. “The hows and whys of it aren’t really important. What’s important is that if you’re going to tell our story, you have to tell it right.”

“You’ll help?”

“Well, duh. How else are you going to fix it?”

“Can I take a one- day rain check on... what? Interviewing you?”

“Take as long as you want,” she says. “Just don’t draw any more lies.”

“How will I reach you?” I ask.

She gives me that grin again, but this time it’s the version that says, I know a secret that you don’t.

“Just call my name.”

“But how will you hear me all the way over in Refinery-town?”

“What makes you think we’re ever any farther than a thought away?”

And then, phwisht, she’s gone.

I think about what she just said. Great. Another invisible presence in my life. That cranky dwarf who did the home-invasion thing a few years ago and moved in on me? He could do the invisible thing, too. It’s just creepy.

“I don’t like being spied on,” I tell the air where she was standing.

“Welcome to the club,” her husky, disembodied voice replies.

“I just had the weirdest conversation,” I say when Nina picks up

the phone at her end.

“With an eight- inch- tall oil fairy?”

“Bingo.”

“I should have called,” she says, “but to tell you the truth, I thought I was having an incident.”

“What do you mean?

“Seeing things, like this friend of mine does when he forgets to take his medication.”

“What are you taking medication for?” I ask.

My amazement at what I’ve just experienced flees in the face of worry for her.

“Nothing,” she assures me. “It was just an analogy.”

“A writer thing.”

“A writer thing,” she agrees. “You know, big words, hidden meanings. All the deep stuff.”

She can always make me laugh.

“So what do you think we should do?” I ask.

Nina doesn’t even pause to think.

“Tell their story,” she says.

“But what if they all start showing up to tell their part?”

Nina laughs. “Well, then you’ll have a whole life- sized contingent of models, ready and willing to pose for you. Weren’t you telling me that you were having a little trouble with the action scenes?”

I wait a beat, then say. “Remember your story about the snake who wants wings? What was his name again?”

“Pelican Bob.”

“Right. You’re on your own with that one.”

Jilly’s by herself when I go over to the professor’s house the next day. I come around the back as usual to the green house door and see her through the window. She’s sitting in her wheelchair with a laptop computer on the low worktable in front of her. She’s got some kind of pen in her hand that she’s using on what looks like a fancy mouse pad. When I tap on the glass, she waves me in.

“Hey, you,” she says.

“Hey, yourself. What’re you doing?”

She gets this cute little proud smile. “Have a look,” she says.

When I come stand behind her shoulder, I see that she’s using a pen and tablet to input information into the laptop. There’s a drawing program window open on the screen showing an incredibly intricate piece of art. Fairies like she used to paint, hovering around an old coffee tin in what looks like an empty lot.

I know she can’t draw or paint anymore. I also know that all her fairy paintings were destroyed after the accident. So while this piece is in her style, it can’t be hers.

“Very nice,” I say. “Where’d it come from?”

“Me,” she says.

My gaze drops down to where the hand of her bad arm lies limply on her lap.

“But...”

She laughs. “No, I haven’t gone all dotty on you. It takes me forever, but I can actually do art again with this program.”

“I don’t understand. You still have to be able to draw to input the lines.”

She nods. “Yes, but you can do it as small as a pixel at a time if you want. So even if I can’t get the expression I once could in my lines, I can get the detail again. Here, look.”

She shows me how she magnifies a small section of the drawing and then adds some pixels with the pen on the tablet. When she reduces the image again, the fairy to the right of the coffee tin has a little more shading under her eyes.

“This is so cool,” I tell her. “How long have you been working like this?”

“It feels like forever. This is only my first one and I started it over a month ago.”

“And never told a soul.”

She shakes her head. “Except for Sophie. I guess I just wanted to make sure I could actually do it.”

“How does it feel— working on a screen like that instead of on paper or canvas?”

“Kind of distancing. I really miss the hands- on part of the pro cess.”

I have to smile. Jilly hasn’t had paint on her hands or in her hair for over a year. It used to be like jewelry— there was always a speck here, a drop there. Vivid colours creating sudden happy highlights. Sometimes I’ve wanted to splash some on her, just for old time’s sake.

“But at least I can do it again,” she adds.

She does something on the tablet and a little window pops up asking her if she wants to save her work. She clicks “save” and then shuts down the computer.

“Sophie left me some tea in the thermos,” she says. “I’m sure there’s enough for both of us. Do you want some?”

“Sure. Let me—”

But she’s already wheeling over to the sink. She reaches for a pair of cups and the thermos, then comes back with them on her lap to where I’m sitting.

“You’d better do the honours,” she says, handing me the thermos. “I can do it, but the tea’d probably be cold by the time I’m done.”

I pour us both a cup, then close the thermos and set it on the table beside the laptop.

“Is that the professor’s?” I ask, nodding at the machine.

“No, it’s Goon’s. He says he never uses it.”

“Grumpy Goon actually lent you his laptop?”

“I know. Go figure.” She takes a sip of her tea. “So what brings you down out of your studio? Not that I’m complaining. I’m happy for the company. But I thought you had a deadline.”

“I do,” I tell her. “It’s just that I met Diesel last night.”

There’s a long pause as she registers that.

“Diesel as in the refinery fairy from your comic?” she finally asks.

“The same. In the flesh. The very tiny flesh. She really is only eight inches tall.”

Jilly leans forward, a happy smile curving her lips.

“I think you need to tell me everything,” she says.

So I do. I mean if you can’t tell Jilly about something like this, then who can you tell?

“She came back again after I got off the phone with Nina,” I say, finishing up, “and we talked some more about how she thinks the story should go. But I don’t know. I told her I’d have to think about it.”

“Because it feels like everything’s being pulled out of your hands?”

“Pretty much. I mean, I was expecting to collaborate with Nina. But this . . . it’s so weird having the characters tell you what the story should be.”

Jilly smiles.

“I tried to convince her to come visit you with me, but she said, and I quote, ‘It’s not to be.’ ”

Jilly nods. “I’m not surprised. Fairy visitations are usually very personal. It’s in their nature to be secretive.”

“But I really wanted you to see her.”

“I will. The way everyone will be able to: in your story.”

“It’s not my story anymore. It’s hers. Theirs.”

“But isn’t that what you wanted?” Jilly asks. “To get away from yourself a little?”

“I suppose I did.”

“And besides. This is the way stories are supposed to be. True to themselves, not to how we want them to be.”

“Like life, I guess.”

Jilly shakes her head. “In life we have to be true to ourselves.”

I nod. Jilly’s always had this way of stating the obvious so that it feels like a revelation.

“How do you keep the pieces of your life separate from each other?” I ask her.

“What makes you think I do?”

I shrug. “I don’t know. You always seem so centered. Even with all that’s happened to you.”

She looks out of a window for a long moment, gaze focused on something other than the professor’s gardens and lawn. Finally she turns to me again.

“Things don’t always work out the way we want them to,” she says. “I know that, big- time. Not when I was a kid. Not when that car ran me down. So I guess I’ve learned to make a point of taking charge of whatever parts of my life I can control. And really appreciating the aspects that are good. It’s like how things are going with Daniel and me.”

Daniel’s her current beau, this drop- dead gorgeous nurse she met when she was in the ICU, right after the accident.

“I could worry about what he sees in me,” she goes on. “You know, he’s this active, handsome guy and here’s me, the Broken Girl. And I did, at first. But he doesn’t see any limitations in our relationship, so why should I go looking for them?”

“So you think I should tell Diesel’s story.”

She shakes her head. “I think you should do what ever your heart tells you is the right thing to do.”

And that, I realize, could as easily apply to every part of my life, not just my refinery fairies comic. If you follow your heart, maybe you don’t have to be confused.

“Diesel,” I say.

I’m sitting alone in my apartment that night, at the drawing table, a pad of plain paper in front of me, a pencil in my hand. I expect her to immediately pop into sight out of nowhere but it’s actually a few moments before she does. She notices the miniature armchair that I’ve left for her at the top of my drawing table and smiles. I bought it at a toy store on the way home from Jilly’s.

“Very nice,” she says as she falls into it, lounging with her legs over one arm with the instant ease of a cat.

I lift the pencil I’m holding. “I’m ready to do it your way.”

She swings her feet to the table and leans forward to look at me, elbows on her knees, hands propping her head. I’m hardly aware of my own hand bringing the pencil to the paper to capture the pose. She grins and starts to talk.

“Wait a minute,” I say when we’re five minutes into this convoluted story about the various relationships between herself and the other fairies. “We only have thirty- two pages.”

“What do you mean?”

“We can’t tell your whole life story in this comic. We have to focus on just one aspect of it, the way I do with my strips.”

“But it’s all important.”

I think about the way I worry when I’m pasting and editing the portions of my life that show up in the strips.

“I know,” I tell her. “But we have to work within our space limitations. Maybe if this one does well we can do another, but for now we have to be a little more practical about what we use and what we leave out.”

“I don’t know how to make a lifetime smaller.”

I get this sense that she’s about to get up and walk off with that swagger she has, stepping away into nothing and I’ll never see her again.

“You don’t have to,” I tell her. “That’s my job— to pick what we use. Why don’t you just tell it to me the way you need to tell it and I’ll take what I think will fit into a thirty- two- page story. If you can trust me to do it right.”

She gives me a long, considering look, then finally nods.

“Of course I trust you,” she says. “And if you get it wrong, I can always turn you into a salamander.”

“You can do that?”

She just winks.

“Let me tell you how I first met Slick,” she says.

Nina and I have been back- and- forthing faxes of notes and rough storyboards, trying to find a way to tell the story in the pages we have without making it seem either rushed or too cram-packed with detail. There are so many things that are killing us to leave out.

Tonight we’re on the phone again, both of us with pages spread out in front of us.

“So did we make them up,” I say at one point, “or were they always there and we just somehow tuned into them when we started this thing?”

Nina laughs. “Does it matter?”

I suppose maybe it doesn’t. How very Zen of us.

Later I’m on the phone with Lyle. He tells me he’s been trying to get through all night, but he’s just saying it. He doesn’t sound impatient or annoyed or anything.

We’ve been having a moony conversation, the kind you have when you haven’t seen each other for a while and the missing part is really kicking in. Somehow we get onto his shapechanging.

“What’s so wrong with you being my pet dog?” I say. “I’ll be your pet Boho girl. We can take turns being pets. Pets have it good you know. Lots of pampering and treats and tickles behind the ear.”

He laughs. “What are you really trying to say here, Mona?”

I surprise myself probably as much as him.

“I think we should live together,” I say. “That way our differences will get to know each other better and I won’t have this constant confusion following me about. What do you think?”

It kind of comes out all in one breath and then there’s this long silence on the other end of the line. My heart goes very still. If my friend Sue were here she’d be shaking her finger at me, telling me something about how girls aren’t supposed to be assertive, it just scares guys away. She’s really sweet, but she does have some old-fashioned ideas.

But maybe I have blown it.

What do I know about relationships? It’s not like I ever had one that really worked before.

I’m about to say something about how I was just kidding when I swear that I can actually feel his smile coming across the phone lines to me.

“I think I’d like that very much,” he says.

Okay. So the confusion didn’t really go away. I think maybe it never does. When things become clear in one part of your life, I guess your capacity for confusion just attaches itself to another part. But I’m learning not to focus so much on it, to worry about what this means, or that means. I’m trying to take things at face value instead.

The comic’s almost done, though I swear Diesel could try the patience of a saint. I’m starting to have some real sympathy for Slick. Diesel and I argue so much, there are times when I feel like she’s really going to turn me into a salamander. Lyle says he’ll love me anyway, but I don’t know. I think a salamander is really pushing it.

You want to know the funniest thing? Nina has me half-convinced to do that Pelican Bob story with her when we’re done with this one. Remember him? The little snake who wanted wings?
A Crow Girls’ Christmas (with MaryAnn Harris)

“We have jobs,” Maida told Jilly when she and Zia dropped by the professor’s house for a visit at the end of November.

Zia nodded happily. “Yes, we’ve become veryvery respectable.”

Jilly had to laugh. “I can’t imagine either of you ever being completely respectable.”

That comment drew an exaggerated pout from each of the crow girls, the one more pronounced than the other.

“Not being completely respectable’s a good thing,” Jilly assured them.

“Yes, well, easy for you to say,” Zia said. “You don’t have a cranky uncle always asking when you’re going to do something useful for a change.”

Maida nodded. “You just get to wheel around and around in your chair and not worry about all the very serious things that we do.”

“Such as?” Jilly asked.

Zia shrugged. “Why don’t pigs fly?”

“Or why is white a colour?” Maida offered.

“Or black.”

“Or yellow ochre.”

“Yellow ochre is a colour,” Jilly said. “Two colours, actually. And white and black are colours, too. Though I suppose they’re not very colourful, are they?”

“Could it be more puzzling?” Zia asked.

Maida simply smiled and held out her tea cup. “May I have a refill, please?”

Jilly pushed the sugar bag over to her. Maida filled her tea cup to the brim with sugar. After a glance at Zia, she filled Zia’s tea cup as well.

“Would you like some?” she asked Jilly.

“No, I’m quite full. Besides, too much tea makes me have to pee.”

The crow girls giggled.

“So what sort of jobs did you get?” Jilly asked.

Zia lowered her teacup and licked the sugar from her upper lip.

“We’re elves!” she said.

Maida nodded happily. “At the mall. We get to help out Santa.”

“Not the real Santa,” Zia explained.

“No, no. He’s much too very busy making toys at the North Pole.”

“This is sort of a cloned Santa.”

“Every mall has one, you know.”

“And we,” Zia announced proudly, “are in charge of handing out the candy canes.”

“Oh my,” Jilly said, thinking of the havoc that could cause.

“Which makes us very important,” Maida said.

“Not to mention useful.”

“So pooh to Lucius, who thinks we’re not.”

“Do they have lots of candy canes in stock?” Jilly asked.

“Mountains,” Zia assured her.

“Besides,” Maida added. “It’s all magic, isn’t it? Santa never runs out of candy or toys.”

That was before you were put in charge of the candy canes, Jilly thought, but she kept her worry to herself.

Much to everyone’s surprise, the crow girls made excellent elves. They began their first daily four- hour shift on December 1, dressed in matching red- and- green outfits that the mall provided: long- sleeved jerseys, short pleated skirts, tights, shoes with exaggerated curling toes, and droopy elf hats with their rowdy black hair poking out from underneath. There were bells on their shoes, bells at the end of their hats, and they each wore brooches made of bells that they’d borrowed from one of the stores in the mall. Because they found it next to impossible to stand still for more than a few seconds at a time, the area around Santa’s chair echoed with their constant jingling. Parents waiting in line, not to mention their eager children, were completely enchanted by their happy antics and the ready smiles on their small dark faces.

“I thought they’d last fifteen minutes,” their uncle Lucius confided to the professor a few days after the pair had started, “but they’ve surprised me.”

“I don’t see why,” the professor said. “It seems to me that they’d be perfectly suited for the job. They’re about as elfish as you can get without being an elf.”

“But they’re normally so easily distracted.”

The professor nodded. “However, there’s candy involved, isn’t there? Jilly tells me that they’ve been put in charge of the candy canes.”

“And isn’t that a source for pride.” Lucius shook his head and smiled. “Trust them to find a way to combine sweets with work.”

“They’ll be the Easter Bunny’s helpers in the spring.”

Lucius laughed. “Maybe I can apprentice them to the Tooth Fairy.”

The crow girls really were perfectly suited to their job. Unlike many of the tired shoppers that trudged by Santa’s chair, they remained enthralled with every aspect of their new environment.

The flashing lights. The jingling bells. The glittering tinsel. The

piped- in Christmas music. The shining ornaments.

And, of course, the great abundance of candy canes.

They treated each child’s questions and excitement as though that child was the first to have this experience. They talked to those waiting in line, made faces so that the children would laugh happily as they were having their pictures taken, handed out candy canes when the children were lifted down from Santa’s lap. They paid rapt attention to every wish expressed and adored hearing about all the wonderful toys available in the shops.

Some children, normally shy about a visit to Santa, returned again and again, completely smitten with the pair.

But mostly, it was all about the candy canes.

The crow girls were extremely generous in handing them out, and equally enthusiastic about their own consumption. They stopped themselves from eating as many as they might have liked, but did consume one little candy cane each for every five minutes they were on the job.

Santa, busy with the children, and also enamored with his cheerful helpers, failed to notice that the sacks of candy canes in the storage area behind his chair were dwindling at an astonishing rate. He never thought to look because it had never been an issue before. There’d always been plenty of candy canes to go around in the past.

On December 19, at the beginning of their noon shift, there were already lines and lines of children waiting excitedly to visit Santa and his crow girl elves. As the photographer was unhooking the cord to let the children in, Maida turned to Zia to ask where the next sack of candy canes was just as Zia asked Maida the very same question. Santa suggested that they’d better hurry up and grab another sack from the storage space.

Trailing the sound of jingling bells, the crow girls went behind his chair.

Zia pulled aside the little curtain.

“Uh- oh,” she said.

Maida pushed in beside her to have a look herself. The two girls exchanged worried looks.

“They’re all gone,” Zia told Santa.

“I’ll go to the stockroom for more,” Maida offered.

Zia nodded. “Me, too.”

“What stockroom?” Santa began.

But then he realized exactly what they were saying. His normally rosy cheeks went as white as his whis kers.

“They’re all gone?” he asked. “All those bags of candy canes?”

“In a word, yes.”

“But where could they all have gone?”

“We give them away,” Maida reminded him. “Remember?”

Zia nodded. “We were supposed to.”

“So that’s what we did.”

“Because it’s our job.”

“And we ate a few,” Maida admitted.

“A veryvery few.”

Santa frowned. “How many is a few?”

“Hmm,” Zia said.

“Good question.”

“Let’s see.”

They both began to count on their fingers as they talked.

“We were veryvery careful not to eat more than twelve an hour.”

“Oh so very careful.”

“So in four hours—”

“—that would be forty- eight—”

“—times two—” “—because there are two of us.”

They paused for a moment, as though to ascertain that there really were only two of them.

“So that would be . . . um . . .”

“Ninety- six—”

“—times how many days?”

“Eigh teen—”

“—not counting today—”

“—because there aren’t any today—”

“—which is why we need to go the stockroom to get more.”

Santa was adding it all up himself. “That’s almost two thousand candy canes you’ve eaten!”

“Well... almost,” Maida said.

“One thousand seven hundred and twenty- eight,” Zia said.

“If you’re keeping count.”

“Which is almost two thousand, I suppose, but not really.”

“Where is the candy cane stockroom?” Maida asked.

“There isn’t one,” Santa told her.

“But—”

“And that means,” he added, “that all the children here today won’t get any candy canes.”

The crow girls looked horrified.

“That means us, too,” Zia said.

Maida nodded. “We’ll also suffer, you know.”

“But we’re ever so stoic.”

“Ask anybody.”

“We’ll hardly complain.”

“And never where you can hear us.”

“Except for now, of course.”

Santa buried his face in hands, completely disconcerting the parent approaching his chair, child in hand.

“Don’t worry!” Maida cried.

“We have everything under control.” Zia looked at Maida. “We do, don’t we?”

Maida closed her eyes for a long moment, then opened them wide and grinned.

“Free tinsel for everyone!” she cried.

“I don’t want tinsel,” the little boy standing in front of Santa with his mother said. “I want a candy cane.”

“Oh, you do want tinsel,” Maida assured him.

“Why does he want tinsel?” Zia asked.

“Because . . . because . . .”

Maida grabbed two handfuls from the boughs of Santa’s Christmas tree. Fluttering the tinsel with both hands over her head, she ran around the small enclosure that housed Santa’s chair.

“Because it’s so fluttery!” she cried.

Zia immediately understood. “And shiny!” Grinning, she grabbed handfuls of her own.

“Veryvery shiny,” Maida agreed.

“And almost as good as candy,” Zia assured the little boy as she handed him some. “Though not quite as sugary good.”

The little boy took the tinsel with a doubtful look, but then Zia whirled him about in a sudden impromptu dance. Soon he was laughing and waving his tinsel as well. From the line, all the children began to clap.

“We want tinsel, too!” one of them cried.

“Tinsel, tinsel!”

The crow girls got through their shift with great success. They danced and twirled on the spot and did mad acrobatics. They fluttered tinsel, blew kisses, jingled their bells, and told stories so outrageous that no one believed them, but everyone laughed.

By the end of their shift, even Santa had come around to seeing “the great excellent especially good fortune of free tinsel.”

Unfortunately, the mall management wasn’t so easily appeased and the crow girls left the employ of the Williamson Street Mall that very day, after first having to turn in their red- and- green elf outfits. But on the plus side, they were paid for their nineteen days of work and spent all their money on chocolate and fudge and candy and ice cream.

When they finally toddled out of the mall into the snowy night, they made chubby snow angels on any lawn they could find, all the way back to the Rookery.

“So now we’re unemployed,” Zia told Jilly when they came over for a visit on the twenty- third, shouting “Happy eve before Christmas eve!” as they trooped into the professor’s house.

“I heard,” Jilly said.

“It was awful,” Maida said.

Jilly nodded. “Losing a job’s never fun.”

“No, no, no,” Zia said. “They ran out of candy canes!”

“Can you imagine?” Maida asked.

Zia shook her head. “Barely. And I was there.”

“Well, I’m sorry to hear that,” Jilly said.

“Yes, it’s a veryvery sorrysome state of affairs,” Maida said.

“And we’re unemployed, too!”

“Lucius says we’re unemployable.”

“Because now we have a record.”

“A permanent record.”

“Of being bad bad candy cane–eating girls.”

They both looked so serious and sad that Jilly became worried. But then Zia laughed. And Maida laughed, too.

“What’s so funny?” Jilly asked.

Zia started to answer, but she collapsed in giggles and couldn’t speak.

Maida giggled, too, but she managed to say, “We sort of like being bad bad candy cane–eating girls.”

Zia got her fit of giggles under control. “Because it’s like being outlaws.”

“Fierce candy cane–eating outlaw girls.”

“And that’s a good thing?” Jilly asked.

“What do you think?” Maida asked.

“I think it is. Merry Christmas, Maida. Merry Christmas, Zia.”

“Merry Christmas to you!” they both cried.

Zia looked at Maida. “Why did you say, ‘Merry Christmas toot toot’?”

“I didn’t say ‘toot toot.’ ”

“I think maybe you did.”

“Didn’t.”

Zia grinned. “Toot toot!”

“Toot toot!”

They pulled their jingling bell brooches out of their pockets, which they’d forgotten to return to the store where they’d “found” them, and marched around the kitchen singing “Jingle Bells” at the top of their lungs until Goon, the professor’s house keeper, came in and made them stop.

Then they sat at the table with their cups of sugar, on their best behavior, which meant they only took their brooches out every few moments, jingled them, and said “toot toot” very quietly. Then, giggling, they’d put the brooches away again.
Dark Eyes, Faith, and Devotion

I’ve just finished cleaning the vomit my last fare left in the backseat— his idea of a tip, I guess, since he actually shortchanged me a couple of bucks— and I’m back cruising when the woman flags me down on Gracie Street, outside one of those girl-on- girl clubs. I’ll tell you, I’m as open- minded as the next guy, but it breaks my heart when I see a looker like this playing for the other team. She’s enough to give me sweet dreams for the rest of the week, and this is only Monday night.

She’s about five- seven or five- eight and dark- skinned— Hispanic, maybe, or Indian. I can’t tell. I just know she’s gorgeous. Jet black hair hanging straight down her back and she’s all decked out in net stockings, spike heels, and a short black dress that looks like it’s been sprayed on and glistens like satin. Somehow she manages to pull it off without looking like a hooker. It’s got to be her baby-doll face— made up to a T, but so innocent all you want to do is keep her safe and take care of her. After you’ve slept with her, mind.

I watch her in the rearview mirror as she gets into the backseat— showing plenty of leg with that short dress of hers and not shy about my seeing it. We both know that’s all I’m getting and I’m lucky to get that much. She wrinkles her nose and I can’t tell if it’s some linger of l’eau de puke or the Lysol I sprayed on the seat after I cleaned up the mess my last fare left behind.

Hell, maybe it’s me.

“What can I do for you, ma’am?” I ask.

She’s got these big dark eyes and they fix on mine in the rearview mirror, just holding on to my gaze like we’re the only two people in the world.

“How far are you willing to go?” she asks.

Dressed like she is, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a come- on. Hell, that was my first thought anyway, doesn’t matter she’s playing on that other team. But there’s that cherub innocence thing she’s got going for her, and, well, take a look at a pug like me and you know the one thing that isn’t going to happen is some pretty girl’s going to make a play for me from the backseat of my cab.

“I can take you anyplace you need to go,” I tell her, playing it safe.

“And if I need something else?” she asks.

I shake my head. “I don’t deal with anything that might put me inside.”

I almost said “back inside,” but that’s not something she needs to know. Though maybe she already does. Maybe when I pulled over she saw the prison tattoos on my arms— you know, you put them on with a pin and the ink from a ballpoint so they always come out looking kind of scratchy and blue.

“Someone has stolen my cat,” she says. “I was hoping you might help me get her back.”

I turn right around in my seat to look at her straight on. I decide she’s Hispanic from her accent. I like the Spanish warmth it puts on her words.

“Your cat,” I say. “You mean like a pet?”

“Something like that. I really do need someone to help me steal her back.”

I laugh. I can’t help it.

“So what, you flag down the first cab you see and figure whoever’s driving it’ll take a short break from cruising for fares to help you creep some joint?”

“Creep?” she asks.

“Break in. But quietly, you know, because you’re hoping you won’t get caught.”

She shakes her head.

“No,” she says. “I just thought you might.”

“And that would be because ...?”

“You’ve got kind eyes.”

People have said a lot of things about me over the years, but that’s something I’ve never heard before. It’s like telling a wolf he’s got a nice smile. I’ve been told I’ve got dead eyes, or a hard stare, but no one’s ever had anything nice to say about them before. I don’t know if it’s because of that, or if it’s because of that innocence she carries that just makes you want to take care of her, but I find myself nodding.

“Sure,” I tell her. “Why not? It’s a slow night. Where can we find this cat of yours?”

“First I need to go home and get changed,” she says. “I can’t go— what was the word you used?” She smiles. “Creep a house wearing this.”

Well, she could, I think, and it would sure make it interesting for me if I was hoisting her up to a window, but I just nod again.

“No problem,” I tell her. “Where do you live?”

This whole situation would drive Hank crazy.

We did time together a while back— we’d each pulled a stretch and they ran in tandem for a few years. It’s all gangs inside now, and since we weren’t either of us black or Indian or Hispanic, and we sure as hell weren’t going to run with the Aryans, we ended up passing a lot of the time with each other. He told me to look him up when I got out and he’d fix me up. A lot of guys say that, but they don’t mean it. You’re trying to do good and you want some hard case showing up at your home or place of employment? I don’t think so.

So I wouldn’t have bothered, but Hank never said something unless he meant it, and since I really did want to take a shot at walking the straight and narrow this time out, I took him up on it.

He hooked me up with this guy named Moth who runs a Gypsy cab company out of a junkyard— you know, the wheels aren’t licensed but so long as no one looks too hard at the piece of bureaucratic paper stuck on the back of the driver’s seat, it’s the kind of thing you can get away with. You just make a point of cruising for fares in the parts of town that the legit cabbies prefer to stay out of.

So Hank gave me the break to make good, and Moth laid one piece of advice on me—“Don’t get involved with your fares”— and I’ve been doing okay, keeping my nose clean, making enough to pay for a room in a boarding house, even stashing a little extra cash away on the side.

Funny thing is I like this gig. I’m not scared to take the rough fares and I’m big enough that the freaks don’t mess with me. Occasionally I even get someone like the woman I picked up on Gracie Street.

None of which explains why I’m parked outside a house across town on Marett Street, getting ready to bust in and rescue a cat.

My partner in crime is sitting in the front with me now. Her name’s Luisa Jaramillo. She’s changed into a tight black T-shirt with a pair of baggy faded jean overalls, black hightops on her feet. Most of her makeup’s gone and her hair’s hidden under a baseball cap turned backwards. She still looks gorgeous. Maybe more than she did before.

“What’s your cat’s name?” I ask.

“Patience.”

I shrug. “That’s okay. You don’t have to tell me.”

“No, that’s her name,” Luisa says. “Patience.”

“And this guy that stole her is ...?”

“My ex- boyfriend. My very recent ex- boyfriend.”

That’s what I get for jumping to conclusions, I think. Hell, I was cruising Gracie Street. That doesn’t automatically put me on the other team either. Only don’t get me wrong. I’m not getting my hopes up or anything. I know I’m just a pug and all she’s doing is using me for this gig because I’m handy and I said I’d do it. There’s not going to be any fairy- tale reward once we get kitty back from her ex. I’ll be lucky to get a handshake.

So why am I doing it?

I’ll lay it out straight: I’m bored. I’ve got a head that never stops working. I’m always considering the percentages, making plans. When I said I’d come to enjoy driving a cab, I was telling the truth. I do. But you’re talking to a guy who’s spent the better part of his life working out deals, and when the deals didn’t pan out, he just went in and took what he needed. That’s what put me inside.

They don’t put a whole lot of innocent people in jail. I’m not saying they aren’t biased towards what most people think of as the dregs of society— the homeboys and Indians and white trash I was raised to be—but most of us doing our time, we did the crime.

Creeping some stranger’s house gives me a buzz like a junkie getting a fix. I don’t get the shakes when I go cold turkey like I’ve been doing these past couple of months, but the jones is still there. Tonight I’m just cozying it up with a sugar coating of doing the shiny white knight bit, that’s all.

I never even stopped to ask her why we were stealing a cat. I just thought, let’s do it. But when you think about it, who steals cats? You lose your cat, you just go get another one. We never had pets when I was a kid, so maybe that’s why I don’t get it. In our house the kids were the pets, only we weren’t so well- treated as I guess Luisa’s cat is. Somebody ever took one of us, the only thing Ma’d regret is the cut in her check from social ser vices.

You want another reason? I don’t often get a chance to hang out with a pretty girl like this.

“So what’s the plan?” I ask.

“The man who lives in that house is very powerful,” Luisa says.

“Your ex.”

She nods.

“So he’s what? A politician? A lawyer? A drug dealer?”

“No, no. Much more powerful than that. He’s a brujo— a witch man. That is not a wrong thing in itself, but his medicine is very bad. He is an evil man.”

I give her the same blank look I’m guessing anybody would.

“I can see you don’t believe me,” she says.

“It’s more like I don’t understand,” I tell her.

“It doesn’t matter. I tell you this only so that you won’t look into his eyes. No matter what, do not meet his gaze with your own.”

“Or what? He’ll turn me into a pumpkin?”

“Something worse,” she says in all seriousness.

She gets out of the car before I can press her on it, but I’m not about to let it go. I get out my side and join her on the sidewalk. She takes my hand and leads me quickly into the shadows cast by a tall hedge that runs the length of the property, separating her ex’s house from its neighbours. I like the feel of her skin against mine. She lets go all too soon.

“What’s really going on here?” I ask her. “I mean, I pick you up outside a girl bar on Gracie Street where you’re dressed like a hooker, and now we’re about to creep some magic guy’s house to get your cat back. None of this is making a whole lot of sense.”

“And yet you are here.”

I give her a slow nod. “Maybe I should never have looked in your eyes,” I say.

I’m joking, but she’s still all seriousness when she answers.

“I would never do such a thing to another human being,” she tells me. “Yes, I went out looking the way I did in hopes of attracting a man such as you, but there was no magic involved.”

I focus on the “a man such as you,” not sure I like what it says about what she thinks of me. I may not look like much, which translates into a lot of nights spent on my own, but I’ve never paid for it.

“You looked like a prostitute, trying to pick up a john or some freak.”

She actually smiles, her teeth flashing in the shadows, white against her dark skin.

“No, I was searching for a man who would desire me enough to want to be close to me, but who had the heart to listen to my story and the compassion to want to help once he knew the trouble I was in.”

“I think you’ve got the wrong guy,” I tell her. “Neither of those are things I’m particularly known for.”

“And yet you are here,” she says again. “And you shouldn’t sell yourself short. Sometimes we don’t fulfill our potential only because there is no one in our life to believe in us.”

I’ve got an idea where she’s going with that—Hank and Moth have talked about that kind of thing some nights when we’re sitting around a campfire in the junkyard, not to mention every damn social worker who’s actually trying to do their job— but I don’t want to go there with her anymore than I do with them. It’s a nice theory, but I’ve never bought it. Your life doesn’t go a certain way just because other people think that’s the way it will.

“You were taking a big chance,” I say instead. “You could’ve picked up some freak with a knife who wasn’t going to stop to listen.”

She shakes her head. “No one would have troubled me.”

“But you need my help with your ex.”

“That is different. I have looked in his eyes. He has sewn black threads in my soul and without a champion at my side, I’m afraid he would pull me back under his influence.”

This I understand. I’ve helped a couple of women get out of a bad relationship by pounding a little sense into their exboyfriend’s head. It’s amazing how the threat of more of the same is so much more effective than a restraining order.

“So you’re looking for some muscle to pound on your ex.”

“I’m hoping that won’t be necessary. You wouldn’t want him for an enemy.”

“Some people say you’re judged by your enemies.”

“Then you would be considered a powerful man, too,” she says.

“So the getup you had on was like a costume.”

She nods, but even in the shadows I can see the bitter look that comes into her eyes.

“I have many ‘costumes’ such as that,” she says. “My boyfriend insists I wear them in order to appear attractive. He likes it that men would desire me, but could not have me.”

“Boy, what planet is he from?” I say. “You could wear a burlap sack and you’d still be drop- dead gorgeous.”

“You did not like the dress?”

I shrug. “What can I say? I’m a guy. Of course I liked it. I’m just saying you don’t need it.”

“You are very sweet.”

Again with the making nice. Funny thing is, I don’t want to argue it with her anymore. I find I like the idea that someone’d say these kinds of things to me. But I don’t pretend there’s a hope in hell that it’ll ever go past this. Instead, I focus on the holes in her story. There are things she isn’t telling me and I say as much, but while she can’t help but look a little guilty, she doesn’t share them either.

“Look,” I tell her. “It doesn’t matter what they are. I just need to know, are they going to get in the way of our getting the job done?”

“I don’t think so.”

I wait a moment but she’s still playing those cards pretty much as close to her vest as she can. I wonder how many of them are wild.

“Okay,” I say. “So we’ll just do it. But we need to make a slight detour first. Do you think your cat can hold out for another hour or so?”

She nods.

She doesn’t ask any questions when I pull up behind a plant nursery over on East Kelly Street. I jimmy the lock on the back door like it’s not even there—hey, it’s what I do, or at least used to do— and slip inside. It takes me a moment to track down what I’m looking for, using the beam of a cheap key ring flashlight to read labels. Finally, I find the shelf I need.

I cut a hole in a small bag of diatomaceous earth and carefully pour a bit of it into each of my jacket’s pockets. When I replace the bag, I leave a five- spot on the shelf beside it as payment. See, I’m learning. Guys back in prison would be laughing their asses off if they ever heard about this, but I don’t care. I may still bust into some guy’s house to help his ex- girlfriend steal back her cat, but I’m done with taking what I haven’t earned.

“You figure he’s home?” I ask when we pull back up outside the house on Marett.

She nods. “He would not leave her alone— not so soon after stealing her from me.”

“You know where his bedroom is?”

“At the back of the house, on the second floor. He is a light sleeper.”

Of course he would be.

“And your cat,” I say. “Would she have the run of the house, or would he keep her in a cage?”

“He would have . . . other methods of keeping her docile.”

“The magic eyes business.”

“His power is not a joking matter,” she says.

“I’m taking it seriously,” I tell her.

Though I’m drawing the line at magic. Thing is, I know guys who can do things with their eyes. You see it in prison all the time—whole conversations taking place without a word being exchanged. It’s all in the eyes. Some guys are like a snake, mesmerizing its prey. The eyes lock on to you and before you know what’s going on, he’s stuck a shiv in your gut and you’re down on the floor, trying to keep your life from leaking out of you, your own blood pouring over your hands.

But I’m pretty good with the thousand- yard stare myself.

I get out of the car and we head for the side door in the carport. I’d have had Luisa stay behind in the cab, except I figure her cat’s going to be a lot more docile if she’s there to carry it back out again.

I give the door a visual check for an alarm. There’s nothing obvious, but that doesn’t mean anything, so I ask Luisa about it.

“A man such as he does not need a security system,” she tells me.

“The magic thing again.”

When she nods, I shrug and take a couple of pairs of surgical gloves out of my back pocket. I hand her one pair and put the other on, then get out my picks.

This door takes a little longer than the one behind the nursery did. For a guy who’s got all these magic chops, he’s still sprung for a decent lock. That makes me feel a little better. I’m not saying that Luisa’s gullible or anything, but with guys like this— doesn’t matter what scam they’re running, magic mumbo jumbo’s not a whole lot different from the threat of a beating— it’s the fear factor that keeps people in line. All you need is for your victim to believe that you can do what you say you’ll do if they don’t toe the line. You don’t actually need magic.

The lock gives up with a soft click. I put my picks away and take out a small can of WD-40, spraying each of the hinges before I let the door swing open. Then I lean close to Luisa, my mouth almost touching her ear.

“Where should we start looking?” I say.

My voice is so soft you wouldn’t hear me a few steps away. She replies as quietly, her breath warm against my ear. This close to her I realize that a woman like her smells just as good as she looks. That’s something I just never had the opportunity to learn before.

“The basement,” Luisa says. “If she is not hiding from him there, then he will have her in his bedroom with him. There is a door leading downstairs, just past that cupboard.”

I nod and start for the door she pointed to, my sneakers silent on the tiled floor. Luisa whispers along behind me. I do the hinges on this door, too, and I’m cautious on the steps going down, putting my feet close to the sides of the risers where they’re less liable to wake a creak.

There was a light switch at the top of the stairs. Once I get to the bottom, I stand silent, listening. There’s nothing. I feel along the wall and come across the other switch I was expecting to find.

“Close your eyes,” I tell Luisa.

I do the same thing and flick the switch. There’s a blast of light behind my closed lids. I crack them slightly and take a quick look around. The basement is furnished, casually, like an upscale rec room. There’s an entertainment center against one wall, a wet bar against another. Nice couch set up in front of the TV. I count three doors, all of them slightly ajar. I’m not sure what they lead to. Furnace room, laundry room, workshop. Who knows?

By the time I’m finished looking around my eyes have adjusted to the light. The one thing I don’t see is a cat.

“You want to try calling her?” I ask.

Luisa shakes her head. “I can feel her. She is hiding in there.” She points to one of the mystery doors. “In the storage room.”

I let her go ahead of me, following after. Better the cat see her first than my ugly mug.

We’re halfway across the room when someone speaks from behind us.

<I knew you would return,> a man’s voice says, speaking Spanish. <And look what you have brought me. A peace offering.>

I turn slowly, not letting on that I know what he’s said. I picked up a lot of Spanish on the street, more in jail. So I just look surprised, which isn’t a stretch. I can’t believe I didn’t feel him approach. When I’m creeping a joint I carry a sixth sense inside me that stretches out throughout the place, letting me know when there’s a change in the air.

Hell, I should at least have heard him on the stairs.

“I have brought you nothing,” Luisa says, speaking En glish for my benefit, I guess.

<And yet I will have you and your champion. I will make you watch as I strip away his flesh and sharpen my claws on his bones.>

“Please. I ask only for our freedom.”

<You can never be free from me.>

I have to admit he’s a handsome dev il. Same dark hair and complexion as Luisa, but there’s no warmth in his eyes.

Oh, I know what Luisa said. Don’t look in his eyes. But the thing is, I don’t play that game. You learn pretty quickly when you’re inside that the one thing you don’t do is back down. Show even a hint of weakness and your fellow inmates will be on you like piranha.

So I just put a hand in the pocket of my jacket and look him straight in the eye, give him my best convict stare.

He smiles. “You are a big one, aren’t you?” he says. “But your size means nothing in this game we will play.”

You ever get into a staring contest? I can see that starting up here, except dark eyes figures he’s going to mesmerize me in seconds, he’s so confident. The funny thing is, I can feel a pull in that gaze of his. His pupils seem to completely fill my sight. I hear a strange whispering in the back of my head and can feel that thousand- yard stare of mine already starting to fray at the edges.

So maybe he’s got some kind of magical power. I don’t know and I don’t care. I take my hand out of my pocket and I’m holding a handful of that diatomaceous earth I picked up earlier in the nursery.

Truth is, I never thought I’d use it. I picked it up as a backup, nothing more. Like insurance just in case, crazy as it sounded, Luisa really knew what she was talking about. I mean, you hear stories about every damn thing you can think of. I never believe most of what I hear, but a computer’s like magic to someone who’s never seen one before— you know what I’m saying? The world’s big enough and strange enough that pretty much anything can be out there in it, somewhere.

So I’ve got that diatomaceous earth in my hand and I throw it right in his face, because I’m panicking a little at the way those eyes of his are getting right into my head and starting to shut me down inside.

You know anything about that stuff? It’s made of ground-up prehistoric shells and bones that are sharp as glass. Gardeners use it to make barriers for various kinds of insects. The bug crawls over it and gets cut to pieces. It’s incredibly fine—so much so that it doesn’t come through the latex of my gloves, but eyes don’t have that kind of protection.

Imagine what it would do if it got in them.

Tall, dark, and broody over there doesn’t have to use his imagination. He lifts his hand as the cloud comes at him, but he’s too late. Too late to wave it away. Too late to close his eyes like I’ve done as I back away from any contact with the stuff.

His eyelids instinctively do what they’re supposed to do in a situation like this: they blink rapidly and the pressure cuts his eyes all to hell and back again.

It doesn’t help when he reaches up with his hands to try to wipe the crap away.

He starts to make this horrible mewling sound and falls to his knees.

I’m over by the wall now, well out of range of the rapidly settling cloud. Looking at him I start to feel a little queasy, thinking I did an overkill on this. I don’t know what went on between him and Luisa— how bad it got, what kind of punishment he deserves— but I think maybe I crossed a line here that I really shouldn’t have.

He lifts his bloodied face, sightless eyes pointed in our direction, and manages to say something else. This time he’s talking in some language I never heard before, ending with some Spanish that I do understand.

<Be so forever,> he cries.

I’m turning to Luisa just then, so I see what happens.

Well, I see it, but it doesn’t register as real. One moment there’s this beautiful dark- haired woman standing there, then she vanishes and there’s only the heap of her clothes left lying on the carpet. I’m still staring slack- jawed when the clothing moves and a sleek black cat wriggles out from under the overalls and darts into the room where Luisa said her cat was.

As I take a step after her, the man starts in with something else in that unrecognizable language. I don’t know if it’s still aimed at Luisa, or if he’s planning to turn me into something, too—hell, I’m a dyed- in- the-wool believer at this point— but I don’t take any chances. I take a few quick steps in his direction and give him a kick in the side of the head. When that doesn’t completely stop him, I give him a couple more.

He finally goes down and stays down.

I turn back to go after Luisa, but before I can, that black cat comes soft- stepping out of the room once more, this time carry

ing a kitten in its mouth.

“Luisa?” I find myself saying.

I swear, even with that kitten in its mouth, the cat nods. But I don’t even need to see that. I only have to look into her eyes. The cat has Luisa’s eyes, there’s no question in my mind about that.

“Is this . . . permanent?” I ask.

The cat’s response is to trot by me, giving her unconscious ex’s body a wide berth as she heads for the stairs.

I stand there, looking at the damage I’ve done to her ex for a long, unhappy moment, then I follow her up the stairs. She’s sitting by the door with the kitten, but I can’t leave it like this. I look around the kitchen, not ready to leave yet.

The cat makes a querulous sound, but I ask her to wait and go prowling through the house. I don’t know what I’m looking for, something to justify what I did downstairs, I guess. I don’t find anything, not really. There are spooky masks and icons and other weird magical- looking artifacts scattered throughout the house, but he’s not going to be the first guy who likes to collect that kind of thing. Nothing explains why he needed to have this hold over Luisa and her— I’m not thinking of the kitten as a cat anymore. After what I saw downstairs, I’m sure it’s her kid.

I go upstairs and poke through his office, his bedroom. Still nothing. But then it’s often like that. Too often the guy you’d never suspect of having a bad thought turns out to beating on his family, or goes postal where he works, or some damn crazy thing.

It really makes you wonder, especially with a guy like Luisa’s ex. You find yourself with power like he’s got, why wouldn’t you use it to put something good into the world?

I know, I know. Look who’s talking. But I’m telling you straight, I might have robbed a lot of people, but I never hurt them. Not intentionally. And never a woman or a kid.

I go back downstairs and find the cat still waiting by the kitchen door for me. She’s got a paw on the kitten, holding it in place.

“Let’s go,” I say.

I haven’t even started to think about how a woman can be changed into a cat, or when and if and how she’ll change back again. I can only deal with one thing at a time.

My first impulse is to burn the place to the ground with him in it, but playing the cowboy like that’s just going to put me back inside and it won’t prove anything. I figure I’ve done enough damage and it’s not like he’s going to call the cops. But the first thing I’m going to do when I get home is change the plates on the cab and dig out the spare set of registration papers that Moth provides for all his vehicles.

For now I follow the cats down the driveway. I open the passenger door to the cab. The mama cat grabs her kitten by the skin at the nape of her neck and jumps in. I close the door and walk around to the driver’s side.

I take a last look at the house, remembering the feel of the guy’s eyes inside my head, the relief I felt when the diatomaceous earth got in his eyes and cut them all to hell. There was a lot of blood, but I don’t know how permanent the damage’ll be. Maybe he’ll come after us, but I doubt it. Nine out of ten times, a guy like that just folds his hand when someone stands up to him.

Besides, the city’s so big, he’s never going to find us, even if he does come looking. It’s not like we run in the same circles or anything.

So I get in the cab, say something that I hope sounds calming to the cats, and we drive away.

I’ve got a different place now, a one- bedroom, ground- floor apartment that gives me access to a backyard. It’s not much, just a jungle of weeds and flowers gone wild, but the cats seem to like it.

I sit on the back steps sometimes and watch them romp around like, well, like the cats they are, I guess. I know I hurt the man who had them under his power, hurt him bad. And I know I walked into his house with a woman and came out with a cat. But it still feels like a dream.

It’s true the cat seems to understand everything I say, and acts smarter than I think a cat would normally act, but what do I know? I never had a pet before. And anybody I talk to seems to think the same thing about their own cat or dog.

I haven’t told anybody about any of this, though I did come at it from a different angle, sitting around the fire in the junk-yard with Hank one night. There were a half dozen of us. Moth, Hank’s girlfriend Lily, and some of the others from their extended family of choice. The junkyard’s in the middle of the city, but it backs onto the Tombs and it gets dark out there. As we sit in deck chairs, nursing beers and coffees, we watch the sparks flicker above the flames in the cut- down steel barrel Moth uses for his fires.

“Did you ever hear any stories about people that can turn into animals?” I ask during a lull in the conversation.

We have those kinds of talks. We can go from carbs and engine torques to what’s wrong with social ser vices or the best kind of herbal tea for nausea. That’d be ginger tea.

“You mean like a werewolf?” Moth says.

Sitting beside him, Paris grins. She’s as dark- haired as Luisa was and her skin’s pretty much covered with tattoos that seem to move on their own in the flickering light.

“Nah,” she says. “Billy Joe’s just looking for a way to turn himself into a raccoon or a monkey so he can get into houses again but without getting caught.”

“I gave that up,” I tell her.

She smiles at me, eyes still teasing. “I know that. But I still like the picture it puts in my head.”

“There are all kinds of stories,” Hank says, “and we know one or two. The way they go, the animal people were here first and some of them are still living among us, not looking any different from you or me.”

They tell a few then—Hank and Lily and Katy, this pretty red-haired girl who lives on her own in a school bus not far from the junkyard. They all tell the stories like they’ve actually met the people they’re talking about, but Katy’s are the best. She’s got the real storyteller’s gift, makes you hang on to every word until she’s done.

“But what about if someone’s put a spell on someone?” I say after a few of their stories, because they’re mostly about people who were born that way, part- animal, part- human, changing their skins as they please. “You know any stories like that? How it works? How they get changed back?”

I’ve got a lot of people looking at me after I come out with that.

Nobody has an answer.

Moth gives me a look, but it’s curious, not demanding. “Why are you asking?” he says.

I just shrug. I don’t know that it’s my story to tell. But as the weeks go by I bring it up again and this time I tell them what happened, or at least what I think happened. Funny thing is, they just take me at my word. They start looking in on it for me, but nobody comes up with an answer.

Maybe there isn’t one.

So I just drive my cab and spend time with these new families of mine— both the one in the junkyard and the cats I’ve got back home. I find it gets easier to walk the straight and narrow the longer you do it. Gets so that doing the right thing, the honest thing, comes like second nature to me.

But I never stop wondering about what happened that night. I don’t even know if they’re really cats who were pretending to be human, or humans that got turned into cats. I guess I’m always going to be waiting to see if they’ll change back.

But I don’t think about it twenty- four/seven. Mostly I just figure it’s my job to make a home for them and keep them safe. And you know what? Turns out I’m pretty good at doing that.
Riding Shotgun

1

I wasn’t surprised to learn that my father had died. He would have been seventy- two this winter and he’d always lived hard— I doubted that had changed after I left the farm. What surprised me was that I was in his will. We hadn’t spoken in twenty- five years. I hadn’t thought of him, except in passing, for maybe half that time. If you’d asked me, I would have said he’d leave his estate to a charity like MADD, considering how it was drunk driving that changed all of our lives.

I missed the funeral. There are a lot of Coes in the phone-book, so it took the lawyers awhile to track me down.

When they told me he’d left everything to me, I authorized them to put the farm up for sale, with the proceeds to be split between MADD and the local animal shelter. Dad never much cared for me, but he always did have a soft spot for strays.

I could have used the money. I’m a half owner of a vintage clothing and thrift shop in Lower Foxville and there always seems to be more money going out than coming in. But I knew it wouldn’t be right to keep this unexpected inheritance.

Alessandra was good about it. There are things we argue about, but how we deal with family isn’t one of them.

We’re not exactly a couple, but we don’t see other people either. It’s hard to explain. We met in AA and we’re good for each other. Neither of us have had a drink in fifteen years— sixteen for me, actually.

We have a pair of bachelor apartments in the same building as the store. Ours isn’t a platonic relationship, but neither of us can sleep with someone else. Alessandra gets panic attacks if she wakes and there’s someone in bed with her.

For me, it just makes the bad dreams worse.

2

We open late on Mondays, so one fall morning after the farm’s sold, but before the closing date, Alessandra and I drive out to have a look at the place. Alessandra wouldn’t have come at all, but I don’t drive anymore and Newford’s public transport system stops at the subdivisions that are still four or five miles south of the farm.

“I haven’t been here in twenty- five years,” I say as we pull into the lane.

I see the farm house ahead, surrounded by elms and maples in their fall colours. The barn and outbuildings lie behind the house, the fields yellow and brown, the hay tall. You know how they say you can never go back, or how everything looks smaller if you do?

As we drive up the lane, everything looks exactly the same.

“I hadn’t spoken to him for that long either,” I add. “To my father, I mean. Not once.”

Alessandra nods. She knows. It’s not like we haven’t shared war stories a hundred times before. Late at night, when the darkness closes in and a drink seems like the only thing that will let us sleep. Instead we talk.

She pulls up near the house and shuts off the engine.

“So what am I doing here?” I ask. “Why would he want me to have anything?”

“I wouldn’t know, Marshall,” she says. “I never met your father.”

And wished she’d never met her own.

I nod. I wasn’t really expecting an answer. The question had been pretty much rhetorical.

“Do you have the key for the house?” she asks.

That makes me smile. I’d forgotten about that. So some things have changed. Back when I lived here, I can’t remember us ever locking our doors.

“I think I’ll walk around a little outside first,” I say.

“Sure. I’ll wait in the car.”

“I won’t be long.”

She touches the bag on the seat between us. “Don’t worry. I’ve got a book.”

She’s always got a book. We pick them up by the boxful at garage and rummage sales, usually for free. You’d be surprised what people will just leave on the curb when the sale’s done. Saves them carting it back inside the house and storing it, I guess.

At the rate we read, and considering our income, these books are a real windfall. Reading’s another way to go somewhere else and keep the past at bay.

“Don’t... you know,” she says as I’m getting out of the car.

Get all wound up in what you can’t change. She doesn’t have to say it.

“I’m okay,” I tell her.

But I’m not. I don’t realize how not until about ten minutes later.

If the old man’s last will and testament surprised me, what I find behind the barn pretty much takes all the strength from my legs. I find it hard to breathe. It’s all I can do just to stand there at the corner of the barn, staring, my hand up on the graying barn wood to keep my balance.

I don’t see the rusted junker, sitting in the tall grass on its wheel rims, the tires rotted away, the grill and right fender smashed in, windshield a spiderweb of cracks, side windows gone. I see the car I’d bought in 1977: a 1965 Chevy Impala two- door hardtop, with a 253 V-8 under the hood and 48,000 original miles on it. Black interior, crocus- yellow exterior, white walls. That long sleek slope of the rear window.

I’m dizzy looking at it. The wreck it is, the beauty and freedom it represented to the seventeen- year- old who’d worked his ass off for a whole summer and winter to be able to afford it. I see them both for a long time—the car that’s there and the one in my head—until it finally settles back into the junker it is and I can breathe again. I push away from the wall, no longer needing it for support.

I had no idea that the old man had retrieved the car after the accident. Or that he’d stored it back here.

I was in police custody for the funeral because there was no one to put up my bail. When I got out of prison after doing my time, the last place I wanted to come was the farm. I wouldn’t have been welcome anyway.

I walk over to the car and try the door, but it’s rusted shut. I make a trip into the barn and come back with a crowbar to pry the door open. I don’t know what all’s been nesting in it, but it doesn’t smell too bad.

I get in and my foot bangs against a beer bottle. I remember that bottle, and the other half dozen just like it I drank that long-ago afternoon.

I sit and stare at the spiderweb cracks that turn the view through the windshield into something like a finished jigsaw puzzle. My chest tightens again. Up on the dash there’s a baseball cap, half- eaten—by mice, I guess. I can make out the insignia. The Newford Hawks, from back when the city had a ball team. I used to listen to the games on a little transistor radio while I was doing my chores.

I’d dream about my car, listen to the games.

After the accident, I had different dreams about this car. About that day. About how it could all have been different.

I still do.

“Let me drive,” Billy had said.

“You want to go to the quarry, little brother, you’re staying in the shotgun seat.”

I’d let him drive before, but I was feeling ornery that day. Too many beers.

Funny.

Alcohol was the problem.

And afterward alcohol was the only thing that had let me forget, allowing me the sweet taste of temporary oblivion. But that wasn’t until I’d done my time and was back on the street again. When I was inside, I’d wake up two, three times a night, that afternoon still as fresh in my mind as when it happened.

I reach under my shirt and pull out a key on a string. I can’t tell you why I’ve kept it all these years. I went through a lot of strings, lost pretty much all I ever had before I turned my life around again, but I’ve hung on to that key through the years.

We’ve got a jar of old keys in the store and I’ve thought of tossing it in with the rest, but I never do.

Keys are funny things. They can unlock the cage and let you out, the way it was for me when I finally got that car. And they can lock you up and stand guard so that you’ll never be free.

That key was both for me.

The string comes over my head easily and that little flat piece of metal with its cut edge fits into the ignition just the way it’s supposed to. I don’t know why, but I put my foot on the clutch and turn the key to the right.

Of course nothing happens. It wasn’t like I was actually expecting it to start up. But when you have the key that fits the lock, you have to try, right?

Then I turn it to the left. Backwards.

Nothing.

I smile to myself and start to turn it back, but it won’t budge. I give it a harder turn, then back and forth, trying to loosen it.

Something like an electric charge runs up my arm.

That arm, my whole right side goes numb. There’s a sharp pain in the center of my chest, radiating out. My vision blurs.

I think:

I’m having a heart attack.

No wonder the old man left the place to me in his will, left this old car just waiting for me.

He knew.

He just knew this would happen.

Crazy idea, but I’m not exactly thinking straight. And then I realize the pain’s on the wrong side of my body for a heart attack.

Then what...?

The sharp hurt doesn’t go away, but my vision clears. Vertigo hits me, deep and sudden, but at the same time I’m disassociated from it. I feel like the world’s falling away below me only it doesn’t seem to concern me. Everything stays in focus. Preternaturally sharp.

I watch the cracks in the windshield disappear. They recede, leaving behind clear, uncracked glass. Weirder still, the view beyond the windshield is a flickering dance of images. It’s like watching time- lapse photography. Seasons change. Weeds and scrub trees come and go. Clouds strobe in the sky, here one moment— thick and woolly, or thin and long, or dark and pregnant with rain— gone the next.

And that’s when I know I’m dreaming.

Or having some kind of attack.

Heart attack... panic attack...

It all stops so suddenly it’s as if I’ve suddenly run up against a wall. The last time I felt like that was twenty- five years ago, when the car was just about to hit the tree. When I put my arm out to stop Billy’s forward motion, but there was too much momentum. He just about tore my arm out of its socket with the force of his forward motion. Went crashing into the windshield. Cracking it. Spraying blood...

The windshield’s not cracked anymore.

There’s a summer day on the other side of it, not the fall day that’s supposed to be there.

“Al... aless ...”

I can’t get her name out.

“I’m definitely driving,” a voice says from beside me. “You are totally wasted.”

I turn so slowly, scared of what I’ll see, scared of what I won’t see. But he’s there. My brother Billy.

Alive.

Alive!

I put out a hand to touch him. To see if he’s real.

He can’t be real.

He backs away from my hand.

“Whoa,” he says. “What’s with the groping, Marsh?”

And then I understand. Not how or why. I just understand that I’ve been given a second chance.

“Are you okay?” Billy asks. “You look a little like Patty Crawford, just before she puked all over the bleachers.”

I let my hand drop.

“I . . . I’m okay,” I tell him.

My voice sounds like a stranger’s in my ears. Distant. No, it’s just that its from another time. Funny, I remember so much, a lot of it painstaking detail, but not the sound of his voice. Not that mole, on his neck, right under his ear.

“I’m just feeling a little . . .”

“Out of it?” Billy finishes for me. “How many beers did you have, anyway?”

I look down at my feet. There’s an empty bottle there. I don’t see any others, but I remember I was starting in on my second half of a twelve- pack. I don’t even know why. It’s a beautiful summer’s day. I’m alive. My brother’s alive. Why the hell would I be drinking?

“So can I drive?” Billy asks.

I need to explain something here. Billy was the golden boy in our family. The smart one who knew by the time he was fourteen that he was going to be a doctor. I, on the other hand, was unfocused. I liked cars. I liked girls. I liked to party. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life beyond get off the farm.

The old man didn’t get it— because it was different for his generation, I guess. You figured out what you wanted to be, what you could be given your situation in life, and that’s what you aimed for. He couldn’t understand that not only did I not know, I didn’t care.

It was bad enough before Mom died. But after that, the friction between us got worse and worse. I could pretend that he favoured my brother because Billy had Mom’s blond hair, that his cherubic features reminded us of her, too. But the truth is, Billy was focused— something the old man could admire. He worked hard in school, aiming for scholarships. The money he got from his part- time jobs went into a college fund, not towards a car.

I couldn’t begin to compete.

But the funny thing is, I never resented Billy for that. The old man, sure. But never Billy.

His dying was such a waste. See, that was the real heartbreak when he died. He was going to be somebody. A doctor. He was going to save lives.

I wasn’t ever going to be anybody.

But I was the one who survived. The drunk driver. The one with nothing to lose.

Sitting here in my old Impala, looking at Billy, I know it doesn’t have to be that way now. I can change what happened. I could just refuse to go anywhere, but Billy’d never let up. He was supposed to be meeting some girl at the quarry. So we have to go.

But so long as I’m not driving, it’s not going to end the way it did the first time around.

“Sure,” I say. “You can drive.”

I open the driver’s door and walk around the car while he scoots over to my seat. He grins at me when I get in, makes a show of putting on his seat belt. He wasn’t wearing one the last time we did this. He takes off his ball cap and throws it onto the dashboard.

I fasten my seat belt as well and then we’re off.

It’s funny, considering how much I’ve thought of that moment, that day, but I can never remember what caused me to lose control of the car. I just know where it happened. I tense up as we start into the sharp turn on our local dead man’s curve— more than one car’s gone skidding off the gravel here. But Billy’s got everything under control. He’s driving fast, but not too fast.

And then it comes. Something, I still don’t know what. A cat, a dog, a rabbit. It doesn’t matter. Something small. Brown and fast.

Billy does the same thing I did— brakes and the car starts to slide on the gravel. But he’s not drunk and he doesn’t panic. He begins to straighten out, but we hit a pothole and it startles him enough to momentarily lose his concentration. The back wheels skid on the gravel. He touches the brakes, remembers he shouldn’t, and lifts his foot.

Too late.

We’re going sideways.

He tries to straighten us again, touches the gas. The wheels catch on a bare patch of dirt along the side of the road. We shoot forward. Out of the curve, across the road.

We’re going fast enough to clear the ditch.

We clear it.

I see the tree coming up. The same oak tree I hit.

We bottom out on the field— the shocks can’t absorb this kind of an impact, but it doesn’t slow our momentum.

Then we hit the tree and the last thing I remember is my seat belt snapping and my face is heading for the windshield.

3
“Hey, cowboy.”

I blink at the unfamiliar voice. Open my eyes. The bright blue of the sky above me hurts too much to look at. It makes my eyes water so I close them again and lie there for a long moment, trying to figure out where I am.

When it comes back to me, it’s all in a rush: the crash. The same damn crash that killed Billy twenty- five years ago, repeating itself even though this time I wasn’t driving.

And if I’m alive, then that means . . .

I sit up fast and my head spins. I’m lying in tall, summer-green grass. The sky’s clear above me, the sun’s bright. I can hear the sound of bees and flies and June bugs. I don’t hurt anywhere. I turn slowly, take in the big oak tree, the road. There’s no car anywhere in sight. No Billy.

That’s impossible. I’d think I was dreaming, but if I am, then I haven’t stopped, because I’m not back in that old wrecked Impala of mine. I’m here, at the crash site, and it’s still summer— not the autumn day when I pried open the Impala’s door in back of the old man’s barn.

Then I see the girl, the one whose voice brought me out of my blackout. She’s standing on the side of the road, one hand on her hip. Her hair’s so dark it’s black and she’s wearing it pulled back in a ponytail. Her features are pretty, if a little hard. She’s wearing bell- bottom jeans, fraying at the hems, and a white tube top. Cute little plastic see- through shoes.

“Welcome back to the world,” she says. “Or what’s left of it for us.”

I realize I know her and dredge her name up from my memory. Ginny Burns. She used to live in the trailer park at the edge of town and ran away from home a couple of years ago— at least it was a couple of years ago if I’m still in the past. She was always a little wild and her taking off like that didn’t really surprise anybody.

Like about half the kids in school, I had a major crush on her, but she was unattainable. Three years older than me and she didn’t date kids.

I’m surprised she’s come back.

“Ginny?” I say.

She studies me a little closer. “I know you,” she says. “Marshall Coe, right? You’ve grown up some since the last time I saw you.”

I may look like a kid, but I’m a middle- aged man inside this seventeen- year- old boy’s body. Still, I feel a flush of pleasure at the thought of her actually knowing my name. I cover it up by standing and brushing the grass and dirt from my jeans.

“So when did you get back?” I ask, trying to be cool.

“What makes you think I ever left?”

“Well, you’ve been... gone.”

She gives me a sad smile that softens her features and makes her look even prettier.

“Yeah,” she says. “Just like you.”

I’m confused for a minute. How could she know I left? Went to jail, moved to the city. That I had this whole life before I found myself back here in my seventeenth year, starting it over again.

“How...?” I start to ask her, but the next thing she says puts a stopper in my mouth that I can’t talk around.

“Did I die?” she says. Her face goes hard again. “With a wire around my neck and some freak’s dick up my ass.”

“I ...”

I don’t know what to say. I’m focused on the word “die.” Then I remember her saying “just like you.” And then...

“What... what do you mean...?”

She comes over to where I’m standing.

“Sit down,” she says, then lowers herself to the ground beside me, sitting cross- legged. “I forgot that it takes time for it all to sink in.”

“What... seriously... what are you talking about?”

“The short of it,” she says, “is we’re dead. And I don’t completely know the long of it.”

“Dead? And my brother?”

She shrugs. “You’re the only one who’s been lying here.”

“But we were together in the car . . .”

“Look, I know it’s confusing, but it gets easier. Just don’t try to figure everything out at the same time—it’s too much at first.”

Easy for her to say.

“So I’m— we’re dead.”

She nods. “Yeah. It wasn’t pretty for me and I guess it wasn’t for you either.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ve been lying here for a few days. Sometimes it takes the soul awhile to wake up again, especially if they died hard.”

I give a slow nod. “I guess I did. But all I really remember is that tree coming up on me . . . so fast...”

“I wish I didn’t remember,” she says.

I think about the little she’s already told me of how she died and it’s already too much. Time to change the subject.

“How do you know all this stuff?” I ask.

She shrugs. “Hanging around in boneyards. The dead have all kinds of things to tell you if you’re willing to listen.”

“So... this is it? This is what we get when we die?”

She shakes her head. “No. Most folks go on— don’t ask me where, because I don’t know and I haven’t met anybody yet who can tell me.”

“But these ghosts you’ve talked to...?”

“Well, like I said, most people go on. Then there’re those you find in boneyards, or haunting the place they died. They won’t accept that they’re dead, so they just . . . linger. And finally there’s the folks like us.”

She paused a moment, but I don’t say anything. I’m not so ready to be a part of her “us.” I don’t know that I’m dead for sure. I don’t know anything, really. For all I know, I’m still sitting in that junked out car out behind my dad’s barn, dreaming all this up. It would sure explain why I feel so damn calm.

But whether I believe or not, I find myself needing to know more.

“What about—” I still can’t say “us,” so I settle for “— them?”

“We’ve still got unfinished business,” she says. “We can’t go on. Not till it’s done.”

I figure I know what her unfinished business is.

“You’re waiting for your killer to be found,” I say.

“Hell, no. I’m just waiting for somebody to find my body so that people know I’m dead.”

I can’t imagine that. Though I guess if I’m dreaming, I’m actually imagining all of this.

“I wonder why I’m still here?” I find myself saying.

“I couldn’t tell you.”

I give a slow nod. “I guess that’s something we all have to work out for ourselves.”

I look back at the oak tree, take in the fresh scars on its trunk. Ginny said I’ve been lying here in the field for days. I guess that explains why the car’s not here. And why Billy’s gone. I’m hoping it’s because he got out of it okay. I’m also hoping that he’s not going through what I did, but I don’t see why he would. I was drunk, with a history of being picked up for one thing or another. Fighting, mostly, and drinking. Joyriding once. Vandalism a couple of times. By the time of the accident, the sheriff was looking for any excuse to put me away, and it’s not like the old man ever stood up for me.

But Billy was about as clean- cut as they come. Dad would go his bail. He’d make sure Billy didn’t spend an hour in jail, never mind the years in prison I did.

But I have to be sure.

“I need to see that he’s all right,” I say and stand up.

“Your brother?”

“Yeah.”

“Mind if I tag along? It gets lonesome sometimes.”

“I don’t mind,” I say.

I start to walk down the road, back to the farm, and she falls into step beside me.

“So I guess you’re stuck around here,” I say.

She gives me a puzzled look, then smiles. “No, we can go anywhere we want. But I keep coming back, thinking there’s some way I can get someone to notice me—you know, so I can steer them to my grave? People can see us, but not all the time, and not necessarily when we want them to. Pike says it’s not impossible to interact with those we left behind, but that it’s really hard. They have to be what he calls sensitive. The big problem is that, even if you do make contact, no one seems to get what you’re trying to say— it comes out garbled, for some reason, or like a riddle—and it’s not like you can write it out for them on a piece of paper, because the thing you can’t do is have physical contact with the, you know, physical world.”

“Because we’re ghosts now.”

She nods.

“Who’s Pike?” I ask.

“John Pike,” she says. “He lived at the end of Connell Road.”

And then I remember. He was a real hermit, living in a tar paper shack at the end of the road. Rumour was he had a fortune in gold stashed away somewhere in that run- down excuse of a house of his, some kind of treasure, for sure. But he also had a couple of mean dogs and a shotgun loaded with salt that he wasn’t afraid to use on trespassers. It did a bang- up job of keeping the curious away when he was alive.

“He died back in ’75, ’76,” I say. “I was just a kid then.”

“So was I. But I remember his picture in the paper.”

I did, too. This scary wild man, long- haired and bearded. Kids used to dare each other to sneak into his place because everybody knew it was haunted.

“So he really was still hanging around,” I say. “Like a ghost.”

She nods. “At least he was when I died, and didn’t that freak me out when I first met him. But he’s gone on now.”

She talks about it so easily, like still hanging around after you’re dead is the most natural thing in the world. But the funny thing is, the longer we’re walking along here, talking, the less unbelievable it seems. I mean, considering how this day’s already gone for me . . .

“So he said, if we try, we can contact the people we left behind?”

“Yeah,” she says. “But that it’s really hard. You need a pretty strong connection between yourself and the person you left behind. And like I said, the time’s got to be right and there’s no way to guess that moment so all you can do is keep trying. The world’s not real for us anymore. All we can do is look at it. We can’t be part of it anymore.”

“It feels pretty real to me.”

I scuff my shoe against the gravel and send bits of it flying into the ditch.

“It just feels real because you expect it to,” she says. “But nothing really moved and no one can see you. You can’t really affect anything.”

“I just kicked that gravel.”

I do it again.

She shakes her head. “No, it just seems like you can. You’ll see.”

4

“Want to hear a weird story?” I say after we’ve been walking

for a while.

She laughs. “What’s weirder than the afterlife?”

I think of what happened about fifteen minutes ago when she stepped in front of this pickup that went barrelling by us. How the driver never saw her. How I tried to grab her. How the pickup went right through both of us.

It’s taken me most of those fifteen minutes for my legs to stop feeling so rubbery. Except if I’m dead, how come it still feels like I have a body?

“Earth to Marshall,” she says.

I blink and give her a confused look.

“You said you had a weird story,” she says. “But now you’re just being weird.”

“Sorry.”

So I tell her about it all, my old Impala, how when I was trying to get the key out of the ignition, I found myself here, back in the past.

There’s a long silence before she finally asks, “Is this on the level?”

I nod.

“So you’re really how old?”

“Forty- three.”

“Forty- three,” she repeats and she gets a look in her eyes that I can’t describe. “Imagine having all those years.”

I kind of glossed over the jail time and the years on skid row, and I don’t expand on them now, because I know what she means. I might have had some tough times— doesn’t matter that I brought them on myself— but at least I had them.

“Anything you’d go back and change if you could?” I ask instead.

She nods. “For starters, I wouldn’t have gotten in the car with the freak that killed me. You know I had a funny feeling as soon as I opened his door, but I so wanted that ride. I was so ready to get away from here.”

She shakes her head and I don’t know what to say. And then we’re at the lane leading up to my old man’s farm and I can’t think of anything but Billy and my need to know that he’s okay.

She trails along behind as we walk up the lane, the same lane I drove up with Alessandra this morning, except that morning hasn’t even happened yet. And I guess the way things have turned out, it never will.

I’m not sure what I expected to find here, but it wasn’t the old man sitting on the front porch when he should be out in the back forty with his tractor. He’s dressed for work: coveralls over a T-shirt, work boots on his feet, John Deere hat on the table beside him. But he doesn’t look like he’s ready to go anywhere. He looks deflated— defeated—and I get scared. Not for me, but for Billy. Because I know now: I died in that crash, but so did my brother. There’s no other way to explain the old man’s grief.

I can barely look at him, sitting there in the rocker, holding a framed picture loosely against his chest, gaze staring right through me as I come onto the porch. Ginny takes a seat on the stairs and doesn’t follow me up.

I stand there looking at him for a long time. There’s an unfamiliar emotion swelling inside me—unfamiliar so far as it concerns my feelings for the old man. I feel bad. For letting him down. For being such a shit. For not trying to be the man he wanted me to be. But especially for killing the son he loved.

“I . . . I’m so sorry, Dad.”

I say the words I never got to say before.

He doesn’t hear me, but he shifts in his chair as though he feels something. Then he lays the photo he’s been holding against his chest down on his lap and I find myself staring down at a school picture of my own seventeen- year- old self.

It’s not Billy he’s mourning.

It’s me.

I back away and slowly make my way down the stairs until I’m sitting beside Ginny.

“What is it?” she says.

I shake my head. For a long time all I can do is stare out across the fields. Ginny puts a hand on my arm. Turns out we can touch each other. We just can’t touch anything in the world we left behind.

“It’s me,” I finally say. “He’s mourning me.”

“Well, what did you expect? You’re his son.”

“No, you don’t get it. He hated me. When... the other time . . . before I changed how it would turn out... when I got drunk and my brother died in the crash... he never spoke to me again. He never went my bail. He never tried to see me. He was never in the courtroom . . .”

My voice trails off. It’s impossible to cata logue the enormity of the distance that lay between us.

“So what?” Ginny asks. “Now he hates your brother?”

“I ...”

I realize I don’t know.

I go back up the stairs. The front door’s open, but the screen door’s closed. I reach for the handle, but I can’t get a grip on it.

“Just walk through,” Ginny says, coming up behind me. “Maybe we can’t touch the world, but it can’t touch us either. At least not”— she looks at my father, grieving—“physically.”

I need to go inside, to find Billy, but the business with the door is freaking me badly. I can’t imagine walking through the screen. But I just can’t seem to grab hold of the handle.

Ginny steps by me and walks right through the door— screen, wooden cross bars, and all. It’s like earlier on the road, when the truck went through us both. She reaches a hand back to me and I take it. I let her lead me inside.

“Which way?” she asks.

I nod down the hallway towards the kitchen and take the lead, ignoring the closed doors of the parlour and the front sitting room. They haven’t been used since my mother died.

When we find the kitchen empty, I lead us up the back stairs. My relief is immediate when we find Billy in his room, sitting at his desk, reading a book. I stay in the doorway, content to look at him, to know he’s alive, but Ginny slips past me and walks over to the desk.

“Eeuw,” she says as she looks at his book.

I join her and see that he’s studying graphic black- and- white pictures of an autopsy. He’s had that book for a while and it is gross— I know, I’ve flipped through it before, but I can never take more than a few pictures.

“He’s going to be a doctor,” I tell Ginny. “He needs to know about this stuff.”

“Yeah, but morbid much?”

I shrug. “He’s always been interested in how people work. You know, muscle tissue and arteries and nerves and stuff.”

Ginny nods. “All the things we don’t have.”

“I guess.”

“He’s a good- looking kid,” she says.

“He takes after our mother.”

I put my hand on Billy’s head, trying to ruffle his hair, but my fingers go into his skull. I pull my hand back quickly.

It doesn’t matter that I can’t touch him, I tell myself. All that matters is that he’s alive.

But I’d still like to give him a last hug before I go.

I settle for a look— drinking in the familiar sight of him, sitting at his desk and studying— then I leave the room.

“What was she like?” Ginny asks as she follows me out into the hall.

“Our mom? Everything the old man and I’m not: gentle, kind, thoughtful. And beautiful. She was like an angel, and now she’s sleeping with them.”

I want to hold that thought, but I can’t. Not anymore.

“Unless she’s like us,” I add as we go down the stairs and step back through the screen door. “Trapped in some kind of nonlife, able to see and hear the world go on around us, but unable to interact with it.”

“Maybe heaven’s where we end up when we go on,” Ginny says.

“Maybe,” I say, wanting to be convinced.

But Ginny lets my word hang, so if I’m going to believe Mom’s safe and happy somewhere, I have to do my own convincing.

I give the old man a last glance before I step off the porch and head back up the lane. There’s nothing left for me here now. I don’t know what happens next, but at least I’ve accomplished this much: I’ve changed the past and made things right again.

But it’s funny. I don’t feel any better. Truth is, what I really want is a drink. Not a beer, like I was drinking before I died, but a stiff shot of whiskey.

I need some oblivion.

I almost ask Ginny if there’s such a thing as ghost whiskey— maybe there’s a reason another word for hard liquor is spirits— but I settle on stepping out of my own head and getting Ginny to talk about her life instead.

“What was your mother like?” I ask her.

She shrugs. “I don’t know. She left us not long after I was born.”

I don’t remember that from what I knew of her before, but I guess it’s not so surprising. The kids I hung with only ever talked about how hot she was.

“That can’t have been easy,” I say.

“I never knew it to be any different. My dad was good to me—you know, he did his best. But he wasn’t equipped to raise a kid, especially not the girl I turned out to be.”

I can guess what she means, but I ask her anyway.

“A girl with a reputation,” she explains. She shakes her head. “It’s not something I ever asked for or wanted, but I sure as hell had one all the same.”

“But you—”

I stop myself from saying it, but she nods and gives me a sad smile.

“Put out all the time, right?”

“It’s just... I heard...”

She cups her hands under her breasts. They’re not disproportionately huge, but you can’t ignore them either. Not in that tight little tube top.

“I got these the summer I turned twelve,” she says, “and by Christmastime, everybody thought I was a slut. I got tired of arguing about it, so after awhile, I just started acting like the trailer trash everybody’d already decided I was. But I’ll tell you this, I was still a virgin when I died.” Her features cloud over. “Well, right up to those last few minutes, I guess.”

“I don’t understand. Why would all these guys—”

“Oh, please. Derek Kirkwood was the one who started it— said I’d done it with him under the bleachers during a football game. Now, I was down there with him, but only having one of his beers. And maybe I let him kiss me and have a little grope, but we never did it.”

“Then why didn’t you say something when he started telling people you did?”

“I’d already stopped caring. I had a lot of ‘boyfriends,’ all right. I was happy to have people take me to dances, to drink their beer and smoke their joints, but the most any of them got was a hand- job.” She gives me a sassy grin that never reaches her eyes. “But none of them was going to admit they didn’t score when Kirkwood supposedly had. They might not ask me out again, but hell. If I had put out, they still probably wouldn’t have.”

“Jesus.”

“If I’d’ve had any brains, I’d’ve put a stop to it long before it got to that point. But it was kind of fun at first— flattering that all these guys wanted me. And then it was too late.”

We’ve reached the end of the lane, but neither of us makes a move to step onto the road.

“So that’s why I took off,” she says. “I wanted a new start. I wanted to go someplace where I could be who I decided I was, instead of letting other people decide it for me.” She shakes her head. “And you can see what a good plan that was.”

“I feel like a shit,” I say.

“Why? Because you wanted to get into my pants as much as those other guys?”

I nod.

“Well, don’t. I probably flirted with you like I did with any guy. I had a rep to uphold and all.”

“It doesn’t seem fair.”

She shakes her head. “Nope. And neither does what we’ve got now, but we’re stuck with it all the same.”

She looks back down the lane at the farm house, then turns to look at me.

“So what are you going to do now, Marshall Coe?” she asks.

“I don’t know.”

“Ever been to Tibet?”

“I’ve never been any farther than the city— not in this life or the other one I had.”

“So let’s do a little traveling. Seeing the sights is about the only option left to us at this point.”

Now it’s my turn to take a last look at the old farm house.

I don’t understand how my father could be grieving for me, but it’s too late now to find out why he is.

I changed the past so that Billy’s alive. Instead of the waste of a life I had, he can go out there and help people, make it a better world. But I can’t be a part of that world.

So there’s nothing left for me here except for the question of why I didn’t go on after I died. Thinking about it, I realize I don’t really care.

“Sure,” I say when I turn back to her. “Why not?”

5

I think time moves differently when you’re dead. You don’t eat and you don’t sleep, but there’s always a little hunger in you that’s maybe got nothing to do with food, and while you don’t lie down and take a nap, there are holes in your awareness all the same. The days don’t seem to follow one after the other so much as jump around—when they don’t slide by in a confusing blur.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I lose track of time. I lose track of everything— the life I had that ended when I tried to start up that old Impala of mine, and the half- day or so of the second one I got.

It all just goes away.

We really do go to Tibet. We go to a lot of different countries, spending most of our time in the wild places. It’s not like the big cities aren’t interesting— and just as wild in their own way— but it gets old fast when people and vehicles keep going through you because no one knows you’re there. That doesn’t happen to you in the big empty places. The mountains of Nepal. The Australian outback. Out on the Arctic tundra. Deep in the Amazon jungles. The red rock canyons of southern Utah. The Mongolian steppes. The mountains of Peru. The Sahara desert.

Sometimes we’re noticed there—by people sensitive to the spirit world— but we can’t communicate with them and we don’t try. The only conversations we have is with the other dead and we don’t spend a lot of time with them either. The ones that stayed behind are mostly a bitter, self- centered group, unable to understand why the world still goes on after they’ve died. I know I’m generalizing here, but unless one has unfinished business, why stay?

But the people with unfinished business aren’t usually such great company either. Most of them died hard and unhappy, and don’t seem as resilient as Ginny in how they deal with it. They’re focused on their deaths, determined to get their business done and move on.

No, that’s not true. Most of them are just focused on their business. They don’t even consider what will happen when it’s done.

But they’re not all like that, because some people’s unfinished business isn’t of a negative nature. Like the mother who’s waiting for her son to graduate. The grandparent waiting for the birth of a grandchild. The husband waiting for his wife to stop mourning and fall in love again. They have stories I can appreciate— at least the first time around. By the third or fourth repetition, I’m ready to move on.

Ginny’s not like that. She’s good company, always ready for a laugh or an adventure, though the longer I get to know her, the more I’m aware of this streak of melancholy that runs under even her best moods. I’m also more than half in love with her, and that’s just weird because, well, we’re both dead, aren’t we?

It’s four years before we get back to this part of the world. I only know that because I remember when I died and, as we’re walking by a newsstand, I happen to see the date on a newspaper, right above a heading that reads “3rd VICTIM FOUND.” The headline depresses me. Seems there’s some guy running around cutting up young women like they were meat at a butcher’s. It’s senseless, and horrible, and I feel for the girls.

Ginny’s looking in a store window and doesn’t notice the headline, so I don’t point it out to her. I don’t want to remind her of her own terror time, starting out to find a new life and finding only an end in pain and horror.

We don’t spend long in the city, but I want to look in on the old man before we head into some new wild place, so we head up into the country. I can’t believe how far the city’s spread in just four years.

The old man’s changed, too. He seems to have aged ten years instead of four. He’s still working the farm—on his own now. I check Billy’s room, but he’s moved out.

It takes me awhile to track him down.

Turns out he made the dream come true. He’s in pre med at Butler U., on a scholarship, but he’s working a job on the side that lets him keep a crummy little bachelor apartment in Lower Foxville, close to the campus. He’s taking a shower when we drift into his apartment. I look around at all his books and things, waiting for him to come out when I realize that Ginny’s not with me. I find her in the bathroom, checking Billy out.

“Jeez,” I say. “Give him a little privacy.”

She pulls her head out of the shower curtain and laughs. “We’re ghosts, Marsh. What difference does it make what we see? Besides, he’s got a nice butt.”

I don’t want to be having this conversation.

“Get away from there,” I say.

But before she can respond, the shower stops and Billy opens the curtain. The first thing I think is, my little brother’s all grown up. The second is, where’d he get the black eye?

But a funny thing happens when I see that bruise. It reminds me of...

It’s like I suddenly wake up from a dream and my thoughts go flying to my other life, the one I had before the old Impala brought me back and put me into this one.

“Alessandra,” I say softly.

Ginny turns to me. “What?”

I repeat the name. How could I have forgotten her? The same way I forgot all that other life, I guess.

“Oh, right,” Ginny says. “Your old girlfriend.”

She was way more than a girlfriend, but I’m not thinking about that right now. I’m thinking about how she was five years younger than me. How right now she’d be fifteen or sixteen, still living at home with her father— the drunk who used her as punching bag.

“I’ve got to see her,” I say.

Ginny starts to say something, but I guess there’s a look in my eyes that makes her just shrug instead.

“I’m proud of you, Billy,” I tell my brother. “But what the hell are you doing fighting? You’re going to be a doctor. You don’t have time for crap like that.”

He doesn’t respond. Why should he? He can’t hear me. He doesn’t even know that we’re here.

Then I lead the way out of his apartment, heading for where Alessandra is living at this time in her life.

“I guess you knew her for a long time,” Ginny says when we’re standing outside the brownstone where Alessandra and her father live.

I nod. “But not when she was a teenager.”

“Then how’d you know to find this place?”

“She took me by here one time. Later, when we were together.”

We stand on the pavement for a while, looking at the building. We’re at the edge of the sidewalk where it meets the road so that we don’t have people walking through us, but there’s not much foot traffic anymore. It’s almost dinnertime and most people are home by now.

“So are we going in?” Ginny asks.

“I guess.”

But I’m reluctant.

For one thing, I’m feeling this enormous guilt at having let all those years Alessandra and I were together just slip away out of my mind like they didn’t mean anything. It was just the opposite. They meant everything. She meant everything.

For another, I’m ner vous about what we’ll find. If we’ve picked a time when her dad’s drunk, it’ll kill me to have to stand by, unable to step in and help.

“Marsh?” Ginny says.

I turn to look at her.

“You don’t have to do this.”

I shake my head. “Yeah, I do.”

And I move forward, up the steps. Apartment 310, Alessandra told me. We walk through the front door into the foyer— doing this has long since stopped bothering me—and head up to the third floor. We can hear yelling when we come out of the stairwell and it gets louder as we go down the hall. Then there’s the sound of breaking glass.

“Is her mother around?” Ginny asks, her voice hushed.

“No. She died when Alessandra was just a kid.”

We step through the door, into the apartment. The noise is coming from down the hall, in the kitchen. I don’t want to be here. I don’t want to bear silent witness to Alessandra’s terrors.

But I can’t stop myself now.

Alessandra’s stories were bad, but it’s worse seeing it firsthand. She’s lying on the floor, curled into a fetal position and bleeding from a cut on her head. Her father’s standing over her, a broken bottle in his hand. That explains the cut.

Alessandra’s crying— soundlessly, trying to be invisible. That’s how she’d describe it to me. That all she was ever able to do was

try to be invisible.

But it never helped.

Her father’s yelling something, but I can’t make out the words through the red rage that comes over me.

I’ve hated this man for a long, long time. In another, forgotten life, but it all comes back to me now in a rush. All those nights that Alessandra woke up crying. All those war stories she told, her voice flat, her eyes lost, looking off into the past.

Her father pulls back his foot, and I lose it.

I charge at him, hands flat in front of me.

I don’t know what I’m thinking. What good will it do if I go running through him? But I can’t do nothing.

And then the impossible happens.

My hands meet flesh. The force of my momentum knocks him backward, off balance, and he goes down. The back of his head catches on the edge of the kitchen counter and makes an awful sound. A wet, cracking sound.

He twists as he falls. Lands on the floor. On his face.

And he doesn’t move.

I stand there, stunned, then slowly step forward. I nudge him with my foot but the toe of my shoes goes right through him.

I turn to Ginny. “What... what just happened?”

She shakes her head and we stand in the kitchen for what seems like a very long time. Staring at him, waiting for him to move.

He never does.

But Alessandra gets up. She holds her hand to her head and blood seeps through her fingers. She shuffles over to him, with the look of a scared dog, ready to bolt at a moment’s notice. She does what I did, nudges him with a foot. Her shoe makes contact, but her father still doesn’t move.

She stares at him, emotions playing across her features. Then she spits on him and slowly backs out of the kitchen.

I’m about to follow her— to do I don’t know what— but Ginny grabs my arm.

“Marsh,” she says, her voice strained.

I turn to see that the body on the floor has started to glow. Ginny and I exchanged puzzled glances. When we look back, the glow is lifting from the body, separate from, but retaining the body’s shape.

It’s Alessandra’s father. The spirit of her father. Sitting up.

Neither of us has ever seen somebody die before. We’ve never been right there when it happens. We don’t know what’s going to happen.

I’m thinking, I don’t want to be here.

The spirit looks around, then pushes itself up from the floor until it’s finally standing. Its face turns to us, but before I can tell if we register in its consciousness, if it even has a consciousness at this point, the spirit begins to diminish. I’m not quite sure how to describe it. It’s as if there was a tiny pinprick hole in the fabric of the world and the light that makes up the spirit just gets sucked away into it.

The last thing we see is that pinhole, shining a light so fierce that when it abruptly winks out, we have stars flashing in our gazes.

I clear my throat, then manage to say, “I guess it... went on.”

Ginny gives a slow nod. “I guess.”

I remember Alessandra and we go looking for her, but she’s left the apartment. I don’t know if my killing her father is going to make things better or worse for her. If it’s going to stop her slow descent into alcoholism that followed her finally getting away from the man in the life where I knew her, or if it’s going to push her into a more radical plunge into I don’t know what.

I can only hope she’ll be all right.

“Was this my unfinished business?” I say, thinking aloud. “Helping Alessandra— maybe saving her life?”

“You’re still here, aren’t you?” Ginny says.

There’s that.

I reach towards the nearest wall and my hand goes through it. Just like it always has since I died.

“How could I have been able to push him like that?” I say. “I can’t even pick up a pencil.”

“I don’t know. Maybe you just...”

“Just what?” I ask when she doesn’t finish.

“Really needed to,” she says. She seems reluctant. “Maybe if we need to do it badly enough... we can. You know, to help somebody or something like that.”

I study her for a long moment.

“You’ve known this all along,” I finally say. “Haven’t you?”

She nods. “But it’s nothing I’ve ever been able to do. Pike told me about it.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? Why were you so insistent on my believing that we can’t affect the real world?”

“I was scared.”

“Scared of what?”

“That you’d leave me.”

“I don’t understand,” I say. “You told me that when we first met. You didn’t even know me then.”

She shrugs. “You just seemed so normal— and you were, too. You are. I’d been so lonely for so long . . .”

I’m beginning to understand.

“You know how to deal with your own unfinished business, don’t you?” I say.

She won’t meet my gaze, but she nods.

“But you’re scared to go on to... wherever it is we go next.”

“I had so little time to be me,” she says. “What happens when we cross over? Do we just disappear like your girlfriend’s father did?”

“We don’t know what happened to him. Where he went.”

“I know. But I don’t want to go yet. I’m not ready.”

I can tell she hates saying it, because it groups her with all those losers hiding out in their graveyards, able to go on, but refusing to.

“Is there even such a thing as unfinished business?” I ask.

She nods.

“And when we do it— whatever it is— do we just get sucked away like Alessandra’s old man did?”

“No. But, you know. You start feeling . . . thinner. Like there’s nothing keeping you here anymore except your own need to stay.”

“Did the graveyard ghosts tell you that?” I ask.

She shakes her head. “No, Pike did.”

“Too bad he’s not around anymore,” I say. “I’d like to have asked him about all of this.”

She told me he’d gone on, way back when we first met. But when I look at her now, I see from the expression on her face that that wasn’t true either.

“He’s still haunting that shack of his, isn’t he?”

She nods.

We stand there for a while, neither of us speaking, uncomfortable with what’s lying between us and too aware of the dead body in the kitchen, of what we both saw happen to the spirit that rose up from it.

I can’t leave it like this.

“I won’t leave you behind,” I tell her. “When we go, we can go together.”

“Promise?”

I nod.

But then everything changes again. Because when we go out looking for Alessandra, we find, instead, the ghost of a broken girl.

6

Her name’s Sarah Hooper and I recognize her from the picture in the newspaper that I saw earlier today. She’s the third victim of what ever freak it is who’s been going around killing young women over the past few weeks. She looks even smaller and frailer in person than she did in the photo. But she didn’t go down easy.

“They say you shouldn’t fight back,” she tells us, “but I didn’t care. I guess I knew he was going to kill me and I just wanted to hurt him if I could. I hit him a few times— in the face, where I knew it’d show— but in the end he was just... you know... too strong . . .”

It’s not too hard to figure out what her unfinished business is.

She was pretty messed up when we found her sitting on the ground in an alley not far from Alessandra’s apartment, just staring at the brick wall across from her, but she’s tougher than she l